Funny Stuff (Chapter 10)

Three graduate students (Larry, Harry, and Barry) are in a hot-air balloon enjoying the expansive vistas of Arizona. After everything goes smoothly for hours, a gust of wind comes up unexpectedly and blows their only map out of Larry's hands. Soon our three students are hopelessly lost. Seeing that they are directly over a canyon, Harry says "I've got an idea. We can call for help and the echo in the canyon will carry our SOS for miles." So he leans over the basket and yells out, "Helllloooooooo! Where are we?"

After hearing the echo of their question reverberate back and forth throughout the canyon, the sound of Harry's plea dies out entirely. Then 10 minutes pass as the three lost souls listen for a reply. Just then, they hear an echoing voice swell up from somewhere far away exclaiming, "Helllloooooooo! You're lost!"

Hearing this, Barry turns to the other two and asserts confidently, "That must have been a statistician." Puzzled, Larry and Harry ask in unison, "Why do you say that?"

"For 3 reasons," relies Barry. "First, he took a long time to answer my question. Second, he was absolutely correct. And third, his answer was absolutely useless."

Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything!

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These 2 jokes were not newly written by me. Instead, they were plucked from depositories of statistical humor, edited slightly, and posted here to in an effort to show that there's a lighter side to this supposedly dry discipline. If you'd like to see more "funny stuff" about statistics, click here to enter Gary Ramseyer's wonderful website entitled "First Internet Gallery of Statistics Jokes."

Copyright © 2012

Schuyler W. Huck
All rights reserved.