Stats/Math Jokes — worst jokes

From Harper's Magazine:
Amount of pizza eaten each day in U.S. (acres): 75

Cologne, May 27 dpa - The U.S. dollar is undervalued against the Deutsch-mark based on how many "Big Mac" hamburger sandwiches the two currencies can purchase, said one of Germany's leading institutes.

The Institute of the German Economy (IW) in Cologne noted that the popular sandwich by the McDonald's restaurant chain is increasingly being used by economists around the world as a measure of currencies' relative purchasing power.

The institute said that currency exchange rates are often unreliable as an instrument to measure purchasing power. At the same time, "baskets" of products used to arrive at comparative purchasing power are complicated to compile.

A simple alternative, now that McDonald's has spread to virtually every country on earth, has become to look at what a Big Mac costs, the IW said.

"A particularly hungry American can buy five Big Macs for 11 dollars. If he exchanged the money into Deutsch-marks, his 18 marks in Germany can just barely obtain four Big Macs," the IW said.

Conclusion: based on the Big Mac index, the dollar is undervalued, the institute said.

Americans can get their best Big Mac buy these days in Moscow, where one sandwich costs only about 59 cents.

But Russians must "work nearly two days in order to afford this meaty capitalist achievement - longer than people in any other country", the IW said.

There are four wheels and eight men on a fire engine.
Four and eight makes 12.
There are 12 inches in a ruler.
Queen Elizabeth is a ruler.
The Queen Elizabeth was a ship.
Ships sail in the sea.
The sea has fish.
Fish have fins.
The Finns are always fighting the Russians.
Russians are known as "red".
Fire engines are always rushin', and that's why they're red.

The farmer's son was returning from the market with the crate of chicken's his father had entrusted to him, when all of a sudden the box fell and broke open. Chickens scurried off in different directions, but the determined boy walked all over the neighborhood scooping up the wayward birds and returning them to the repaired crate. Hoping he had found them all, the boy reluctantly returned home, expecting the worst.

"Pa, the chickens got loose," the boy confessed sadly, "but I managed to find all twelve of them."

"Well, you did real good, son," the farmer beamed. "You left with seven."

The unit engineer had just finished a talk on introducing mechanization in fatigue details. A sergeant reported thoughtfully: "Sir, I just discovered something that does the work of fifty men."

"What is it?" the officer got interested.

"Two hundred soldiers."

The new Ensign was assigned to subs, where he'd dreamed of working since a young boy.

He was trying to impress the Master Chief with his expertise learned in Submarine School. The Master Chief cut him off quickly and said, "Listen, 'sir', it's real simple. Add the number of times we dive to the number of times we surface. Divide that number by two. If the result doesn't come out even, don't open the hatch."

A grade school teacher was asking students what their parents did for a living. "Tim, you be first. What does your mother do all day?" Tim stood up and proudly said, "She's a doctor."

"That's wonderful. How about you, Amy?" Amy shyly stood up, scuffed her feet and said, "My father is a mailman."

"Thank you, Amy" said the teacher. "What does your parent do, Billy?" Billy proudly stood up and announced, "Nothing. He's an economist."

Ten things to do with a graduate Economics textbook:

1. Press pretty flowers.
2. Press pretty insects.
3. Use it as paper weight on your already overcluttered desk.
4. Leave out in obvious places to impress uninformed undergraduates.
5. Mail to the White House as an intimidation tactic.
6. Give it a walk-on part in a boring European existentialist play.
7. Just throw the lousy thing away.
8. Leave out for the rain and other forces of nature to reckon with.
9. Read it, and weep.
10. Get a refund from bookstore so you can buy a weekend's beer supply.

There is also a joke about the last Mayday parade in the Soviet Union.

After the tanks and the troops and the planes and the missiles rolled by there came ten men dressed in black. "Are they Spies?" Asked Gorby? "They are economists," replies the KGB director, "imagine the havoc they will wreak when we set them loose on the Americans"

Economic computer viruses:

• INTEREST GROUP ECONOMIST VIRUS - Divides your hard disk into hundreds of little units, each of which does practically nothing, but all of which claim to be the most important part of the computer.
• ECONOMETRICIAN VIRUS - Sixty percent of the PCs infected will lose 38 percent of their data 14 percent of the time (plus or minus a 3.5 percent margin of error).
• POLITICAL THINK TANK ECONOMIST VIRUS - Doesn't do anything, but you can't get rid of it until next election.
• GOVERNMENT ECONOMIST VIRUS - nothing works on your system, but all your diagnostic software says everything is just fine.
• MARXIAN ECONOMIST VIRUS - Helps your computer shut down whenever it wants to.
• SOVIET ECONOMIST VIRUS - Crashes your computer, but denies it ever happened.
• MAINSTREAM ECONOMIST VIRUS - It claims it feels threatened by the other files on your PC and erases then in "self-defense."
• CENTRAL BANK ECONOMIST VIRUS - Makes sure that it's bigger than any other file.
• MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION ECONOMIST VIRUS - Deletes all monetary files, but keeps smiling and sending messages about how the economy is going to get better.
• SUPPLY SIDE ECONOMIST VIRUS - Puts your computer to sleep for four years. When your computer wakes up, you're trillion more dollars in debt.
• NEW ECONOMY VIRUS - Also known as the "Tricky Dick Virus." You can wipe it out, but it always makes a comeback.
• ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMIST VIRUS - Before allowing you to delete any file, it first asks you if you've considered the alternatives