Tony Deyal, Contributor
TRINIDADIANS SEEM to have taken leave of their census. Now that we are in the political silly season there is a plethora of polls and a surfeit of surveys. Wherever you go there are people meters and people meeters asking the most inane questions and demanding the most intimate information about your family size, sexual and other preferences, political opinions and media consumption.
At the same time, people are even more sceptical about surveys and poll-data. It is said that 79.48 per cent of all statistics are made up on the spot. Most people agree with former British Prime Minister Disraeli that "there are lies, damned lies and statistics." Mark Twain, the humorist, was even more blunt. He said, "Statistics are like ladies of the night. Once you get them down, you can do anything with them." However, statisticians claim that it is not the figures themselves, but what you do with them that matters.
For instance, there is the case of the man who drowned trying to walk across a lake with an average depth of three feet. There is the story of the old lady, Great-aunt Bessie, who loved to visit her nieces and nephews throughout the world. The problem was that no matter how much she enjoyed seeing them, she hated flying. People kept telling her that flying was safe, but she continued to be obsessed that someone would have a bomb on the plane.
Finally, the family decided that if she saw the statistics she would be convinced. So they sent her to a friend of the family who was a statistician.
"Tell me," she asked suspiciously, "what are the chances that someone will have a bomb on a plane?"
The statistician smiled condescendingly, "A very small chance. Maybe one in five million."
She nodded, thought for a moment, then enquired, "So what are the odds of two people having a bomb on the same plane?" The statistician responded, "Extremely remote. About one in a billion."Aunt Bessie nodded and left his office. And from that day on, every time she flew, she took a bomb with her.
Many people use statistics as a drunken man uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination. "Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country," stressed Mayor Marion Barry of Washington, D.C.
There was a statistician who, when driving his car, would always accelerate hard before coming to any intersection and would drive straight through it, then slow down once he had got past it. One day, he took a passenger, who was understandably unnerved by his driving style, and asked him why he went so fast over intersections.
The statistics professor replied, "Well, statistically speaking, you are far more likely to have an accident at an intersection, so I just make sure that I spend less time there."
A Trinidadian businessman boarded a flight and was lucky enough to be seated next to an absolutely gorgeous woman. They exchanged brief hellos and he noticed that she was reading a manual about sexual statistics. He asked her about it and she replied, "This is a very interesting book about sexual statistics. It identifies that American Indians have the longest average penis and East Indian men have the biggest average diameter. By the way, my name is Jill. What's yours?"He replied in a flash, "Tonto Rampersadsingh, nice to meet you."
A statistician is someone who is skilled at drawing a precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion. While Dr. Ryan is famous for his poll, most statisticians are mathematicians broken down by age and sex.
There are reputedly two kinds of statisticians, those that can count and those that can't. One statistician, who had his head in an oven and his feet in a bucket of ice, was asked how he felt.He answered, "On the average I feel just fine."
Three people were in a hot-air balloon and got lost. They decided to shout loudly asking, "Where are we?"Finally, after a long wait, someone shouted up at them, "You're lost!"One of the men said, "That must have been a statistician." When asked to explain, he said, "For three reasons, one he took a long time to answer, two he was absolutely correct and three, his answer was absolutely useless."
There is a story about the future. It seems students, needing to learn any subject, could go to the pharmacy and buy a knowledge pill.One student wanting to learn English Literature bought his pill, swallowed it easily, and immediately became an expert. Another bought art history, biology, and world history and took all three together without a problem.
Then one asked for a statistics pill. The pharmacist brought out a pill the size of a dinner roll. The student asked, "Why such a huge pill for statistics?" The man nodded understandingly and replied, "Well, you know statistics are always a little hard to swallow."
Tony Deyal was last seen talking about Henry Ford. It seemed that the famous car-maker told God that His great invention, women, were flawed. God replied, "That might be true. However, the statistics show more men are riding my invention than yours."
