Category: Numbers & Statistics

Statistical Bollocks

Drive Time, Numbers & Statistics

Did you know which is the most dangerous interstate highway in the U.S.?  (I’ll let you ponder that for a moment.)

According to this study, it’s Interstate 45 — with five accidents per 100 miles — which runs from Dallas to Galveston via Houston.

Which, as any fule kno, is complete nonsense — what statisticians call “bullshit” — because I-45 is also one of the shortest highways in the U.S.  And yes, it’s busy.  But ask any Texan whether they’d rather drive from Dallas to Austin on I-35, or on I-45 to Houston (about the same distance) and 35 would lose by a landslide.

But I-35, you see, is a long interstate highway (running from Laredo TX all the way north until it dies out of sheer boredom somewhere in Minnesota), so its deadliness is mitigated by long stretches of nowhere in which nothing happens (I’m looking at northern Oklahoma, Kansas and Iowa, for example), so its deaths / mile count drops substantially.  Hell, I’d rather drive on the Long Island Expressway than the distance between Dallas north to Denton on I-35.  (I’ve done both, more times than I can count, and there’s no comparison.)

And for sheer white-knuckle terror, consider I-40 from California to wherever it ends on the East Coast…

Be careful of numbers, folks:  they often lie.  And by the way, the article itself is, quelle surprise, complete bollocks too because they use two totally different measurement metrics — deaths per 100 miles (distance), and deaths per million passenger-miles — which are completely different.  But hey, it’s the Daily Mail.

So Much For Delta

Health, Nannies, Numbers & Statistics

…and I don’t mean the airline, either.  Try this refreshing dose of commonsense:

America’s Frontline Doctors, that brave group of physicians who have resisted the enforced party line on COVID, has published a video from Britain that takes 3 minutes to show that the appearance and rapid spread of the delta variant in England has led to a decline in hospitalizations and deaths. It is well worth watching as it methodically graphs the data on Covid there, proving that the scaremongering is deceptive propaganda.

Also in the link:  yet more proof (as if any were needed) that Fauci is a mendacious bastard.

Innumeracy

Numbers & Statistics

Oh FFS.  This simple question has apparently caused all sorts of mayhem among the innumerate:

The answer is of course “FALSE” — and to think otherwise is to be ignorant of two of the simplest definitions in mathematics, i.e.

  • “A right angle is defined as two straight lines meeting at a 90-degree angle”, and
  • “There are no straight lines in the circumference of a circle.”

And in the above picture, there’s only one straight line.

That anyone can even be fooled by the question means that math education has been completely screwed up.  I agree that it’s quite a tough question for a seven-year-old child (as posed in the article), but nobody with more than a seventh-grade education should be stumped by it, let alone a professor of mathematics.

By the way, ignore the red herring that a straight line consists of two right angles:  that’s only a partial definition of straight line.  (“The shortest linear distance between two points” contains only implied angles, not actual ones.)

And by the way:  the correct spelling is “two right angles”, no hyphen necessary.

I need another gin.

Update:  Oh FFS-squared.

For the above diagram to contain two right angles, one would have to add a third radius, thus:

Now the question “There are two right angles” has the answer “True”  (A0C, B0C).  If you were to answer “False”, giving “because there are four right angles” as your reasoning, you would (rightly) be given an “Incorrect” because there are only four right angles in the imaginary world (i.e. Thales’ Theorem et al.).  However, we are not in an imaginary world because we are not talking concepts, we are talking about an actual diagram.  And to cap it all, we are talking about a question posed to a seven-year-old child, for whom Thales has no existence.

As I explained to a Reader in an email on this very topic, it always pays to remember that mathematics has little basis in reality, e.g. where a line can have direction but no thickness and a point has a position but no size.  And I’m not even going to touch on division by zero… [eyecross]

Quote Of The Day

Numbers & Statistics, QOTD

From Taki’s Magazine:

If there are two categories in which black people outperform nearly everyone else on the planet, those would be sporting events and crime.

Our modern era is no different from other ones, despite our pretensions at civilization.  You can get pilloried, accused and even arrested just for speaking the truth.

Galileo would understand exactly what I’m saying.

Jackals Of The Press #1,254

Media Assholes, Numbers & Statistics

I know, I know:  if you want fair and balanced reporting, don’t read Britain’s Daily Mail.  Yet I persist, despite nonsense like this, because I am weak.

This particular article starts off well, showing people getting their last kicks in before the latest totalitarian bollocks from H.M. Government, in the usual Daily Mail  fashion:

 

All well and good, and nothing puts me in a good mood like Train Smash Women (like I said, I am so weak).

However, the DM then eschews standard journalistic principle — I know, I know — and turns a general-interest piece into a study of the Chinkvirus re-emergence in Britishland.  For reasons best known to themselves, they publish some scawwwwy-looking graphs with the usual crap predictions from Doom & Gloom Inc.:

…although they do have the grace to give some actual numbers:

…which of course shows that even though hospitalizations are increasing, the death rate (which is the important number) isn’t doing anything alarming.

But non-alarms don’t boost readership, so the JOTP publish two graphs which show how scawwwy things could get, only they use Spain and France — no doubt because those two countries’ experience bolsters the alarmism:

Of course, what gives this bullshit away is the way the graphs are scaled.  Note that the right-hand graph (of daily fatalities) has a very fine scale, which despite the steep climb, simply means that the Spanish fatality rate has gone from much less than 1 to just over 2 deaths per million population  (0.2 per hundred thousand = 2 per million), while the Frogs have gone from pretty much zero to 5 per ten million.

I don’t have access to those countries’ accident stats, but I imagine that 2 per million and 5 per 10 million respectively are rather less than the death rates from, oh, falling down stairs or drowning in a bucket of wine.

So the DM took a perfectly okay article about people getting their last unfettered drinks in, and added all that pseudo-scientific bullshit.  Of course, those are really subjects for two different articles (one of the prime journo principles being:  don’t try to tell two stories in a single article).

Were it not for daily pics of the skinny Amanda Holden and the not-so-skinny Kelly Brook, I’d give them up altogether.

 

But did I already mention how weak I am?

Headache

Good Stuff, Numbers & Statistics

Just when I thought I’d figured it all out, comes shit like this:

‘They are the sort of equations that arise when you try to study something that evolves in time but also depends on space.
‘For example, like the wind in a wind tunnel you want to model the flow of air then that of course depends on time because it changes over time but it also depends on space – the velocity of the air is different at different points in the wind tunnel.
‘So if you have a system like this which furthermore evolves under the influence of randomness.
‘So if you have randomness that enters the game then that’s described by stochastic partial differential equation.’

I used to work with people like this when designing predictive algorithms, and I would place bets with myself as to how long (measured in seconds) it would take before I lost track of the conversation completely and the speech became unintelligible.  Usually, it was about twenty seconds.

It gets worse.  The reason I used “20 seconds” in the above sentence is because I actually kept count, over the year’s worth of discussions and meetings, of the times.  Then I created a distribution chart — bell-shaped, of course, with the most common incidence around 20.

Yeah, I was a fucking geek, too.  Just a much more limited one.

By the way, if you read the article — and you should — there’s a glaring (but non-mathematical) error.  Call it the Obama Fallacy, and see if you can spot it.