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Infinite Hotels

A very large mathematical convention was held in Las Vegas. The conventioneers filled two hotels, each with an infinite number of rooms. The hotels were across the street from each other and were owned by brothers. One evening, while everyone was out at a bar-b-que, one of the hotels burned to the ground. The brothers got together and worked out a plan. In the remaining hotel, they moved all guests to twice their room number -- room 101 moved to 202, room 1234 moved to room 2468, etc. Then all the odd number rooms were empty, and there were an infinite number of odd rooms. So the guests from the other hotel moved into them

Irish Math

There's these four Irishmen in a bar, all drinking Guinness. One of them is looking rather puzzled, so another turns to him and asks him what's the matter.

- 1st Irishman: Well, I was just trying to remember what 2 plus 2 is.

- 2nd Irishman: Oh, that's easy, it's 147.

- 1st Irishman: No no no, that can't be right. How about you, Fergus, do you know what 2 plus 2 is?

- 3rd Irishman: Hmmm ... could it be Wednesday, perhaps?

- 1st Irishman: No no no, that doesn't sound right either. How about you Pat, do you know?

- 4th Irishman: Simple, the answer is 4.

- 1st Irishman: Of course! How did you work it out?!

- 4th Irishman: Aha, that's where brains come in! I subtracted 147 from Wednesday!

Fencing In Sheep

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are trying to set up a fenced-in area for some sheep, but they have a limited amount of building material. The engineer gets up first and makes a square fence with the material, reasoning that it's a pretty good working solution. "No no," says the physicist, "there's a better way." He takes the fence and makes a circular pen, showing how it encompasses the maximum possible space with the given material.

Then the mathematician speaks up: "No, no, there's an even better way." To the others' amusement he proceeds to construct a little tiny fence around himself, then declares: "I define myself to be on the outside."

Misunderstood Statisticians

  1. They speak only the Greek language.
  2. They usually have long threatening names such as Bonferonni, Tchebycheff, Schatzoff, Hotelling, and Godambe. Where are the statisticians with names such as Smith, Brown, or Johnson?
  3. They are fond of all snakes and typically own as a pet a large South American snake called an ANOCOVA.
  4. For perverse reasons, rather than view a matrix right side up they prefer to invert it.
  5. Rather than moonlighting by holding Amway parties they earn a few extra bucks by holding pocket-protector parties.
  6. They are frequently seen in their back yards on clear nights gazing through powerful amateur telescopes looking for distant star constellations called ANOVA's.
  7. They are 99% confident that sleep can not be induced in an introductory statistics class by lecturing on z-scores.
  8. Their idea of a scenic and exotic trip is traveling three standard deviations above the mean in a normal distribution.
  9. They manifest many psychological disorders because as young statisticians many of their statistical hypotheses were rejected.
  10. They express a deap-seated fear that society will someday construct tests that will enable everyone to make the same score. Without variation or individual differences the field of statistics has no real function and a statistician becomes a penniless ward of the state.

Geometry Drugs

"Psst, c'mere," said the shifty-eyed man wearing a long black trenchcoat, as he beckoned me off the rainy street into a damp dark alley. I followed.

- What are you selling?

- Geometrical algebra drugs.

- Huh!?

- Geometry drugs. Ya got your uppers, your downers, your sidewaysers, your inside-outers...

"Stop right there," I interrupted. "I've never heard of inside-outers."

- Oh, man, you'll love 'em. Makes you feel like M.C. ever-lovin' Escher on a particularly weird day.

- Go on...

"OK, your inside-outers, your arbitrary bilinear mappers, and here, heh, here are the best ones," he said, pulling out a large clear bottle of orange pills.

- What are those, then?

- Givens transformers. They'll rotate you about more planes than you even knew existed.

- Sounds gross. What about those bilinear mappers?

- There's a whole variety of them. Here's one you'll love -- they call it 'One Over Z' on the street. Take one of these little bad boys and you'll be on speaking terms with the Point at Infinity.

Statistician One-Liners

A new government 10 year survey cost $3,000,000,000 revealed that 3/4 of the people in America make up 75% of the population.

According to recent surveys, 51% of the people are in the majority.

Did you know that 87.166253% of all statistics claim a precision of results that is not justified by the method employed?

80% of all statistics quoted to prove a point are made up on the spot.

According to a recent survey, 33 of the people say they participate in surveys.

What do you call a statistician on drugs?
→ A high flyer.

How many statisticians does it take to change a lightbulb?
→ 1-3, alpha = .05

There is no truth to the allegation that statisticians are mean. They are just your standard normal deviates.

Did you hear about the statistician who invented a device to measure the weight of trees?
→ It's referred to as the log scale.

Did you hear about the statistician who took the Dale Carnegie course?
→ He improved his confidence from .95 to .99.

Why don't statisticians like to model new clothes?
→ Lack of fit.

Did you hear about the statistician who was thrown in jail?
→ He now has zero degrees of freedom.

Statisticians must stay away from children's toys because they regress so easily.

The only time a pie chart is appropriate is at a baker's convention.

Never show a bar chart at an AA meeting.

Old statisticians never die, they just undergo a transformation.

How do you tell one bathroom full of statisticians from another?
→ Check the p-value.

Did you hear about the statistician who made a career change and became an surgeon specializing in ob/gyn?
→ His specialty was histerectograms.

The most important statistic for car manufacturers is autocorrelation.

Some statisticians don't drink because they are t-test totalers. Others drink the hard stuff as evidenced by the proliferation of box-and-whiskey plots.

Underwater ship builders are concerned with sub-optimization.

The Lipton Company is big on statistics--especially t-tests.

Reducing Travel Risk

There was this statistics student who, when driving his car, would always accelerate hard before coming to any junction, whizz straight over it, then slow down again once he'd got over it. One day, he took a passenger, who was understandably unnerved by his driving style, and asked him why he went so fast over junctions. The statistics student replied, "Well, statistically speaking, you are far more likely to have an accident at a junction, so I just make sure that I spend less time there."

Statistician's Answering Machine

Hello, this is probably 438-9012, yes, the house of the famous statistician. I'm probably not at home, or not wanting to answer the phone, most probably the latter, according to my latest calculations. Supposing that the universe doesn't end in the next 30 seconds, the odds of which I'm still trying to calculate, you can leave your name, phone number, and message, and I'll probably phone you back. So far the probability of that is about 0.645. Have a nice day.

An Academic Problem

An academic problemIn a high school gym class, all the girls are lined up against one wall, and all the boys against the opposite wall. Every ten seconds, they walk toward each other exactly half the remaining distance between them. A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are asked, "When will the girls and boys meet?" Mathematician: "Never." Physicist: "In an infinite amount of time." Engineer: "Well... in about two minutes, they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."

100 Buckets Of Bits

100 Buckets of Bits

100 buckets of bits on the bus
100 buckets of bits
Take one down, short it to ground
FF buckets of bits on the bus

FF buckets of bits on the bus
FF buckets of bits
Take one down, short it to ground
FE buckets of bits on the bus

....