Funny Stuff (Chapter 12)

One day, a meeting took place in the Administration Building between the Dean and a small interdisciplinary group of faculty members. One was a physicist, one was a chemist, and one was a statistician. About half-way through the meeting, a fire broke out in the wastebasket. To show how physics could be applied to the "real world," the physicist immediately started to calculate how much energy would have to be removed from the fire to stop the combustion. Not to be outdone, the chemist began to talk about "regents" and which one could be added to the fire to prevent oxidation. The Dean was impressed.

Just then, the statistician jumped up and began setting new fires in all of the other wastebaskets in the conference room. The Dean yelled at the statistician saying, "What in the world are you doing? Have you lost your mind?"

"Not at all," responded the statistician. "We simply need a larger n!"

Statisticians never die. They just undergo one transformation after another.

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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.