Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for September 05, 2018

Especially a certain well-placed idiot we all know.

Danae, while you’re waiting for the Vice Principal, google the meaning of statistical blip.

At least she didn’t produce a chart predicting the size of the teacher’s double chin.

Is this a new record for the time it took to get sent to Vice Principal’s office?

Sounds very familiar – like last night’s news?

Back to reality.

“There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Stats are automatically skewed by the wording of the questions in the Surveys!

Yeah, somebody’s stats are sure skewed.

If you torture data long enough, you can get it to confess to anything.

There are lies

There are darned lies (and)

There are statistics

Danae would do well in the Dump administration, except she’d be his competition.

If there is a way to skew the stats, Danae will hunt for it.

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.

As someone once said in MAD Magazine YEARS Ago: “Give me enough numbers, and I can PROVE to you that Rhode Island is bigger then Texas!”

Isn’t this more like the media predictions of ‘Doom&Gloom’ being dashed by a booming economy?

Economy isn’t all there is to life. I suspect a lot of people are trying to spend as much as they can before the world ends. Now, excuse me while I go to Amazon to order my new swimming pool.

Put Danae,Calvin,and Alice in a room.Watch the sparks fly ;)

Any set of numbers that allow an optimistic projection can be reinterpreted to prove the opposite.

And if the set of numbers consists of a single, incomplete data point . . .

As the old saying goes, figures don’t lie but liars figure. That’s the whole objective of sadistical analysis.

There is a lesson here for Democrats, just because your person is projected to win, they won’t win if you don’t actually get out and vote.Ignore the polls, get off your couch, find the time, before or after work, whatever it is you need to do, and vote. Voting is the most important right we have in America and we may be on the verge of losing that right.

The Democrat politicians may not be perfect, but the Republican politicians are perfectly horrible. Anyone who doesn’t immediately without hesitation distance themselves and denounce supremacists, most especially Nazi’s and their affiliates, has no right holding any office in America, let alone the highest offices.

The problem is not stats, as long as the stats are accurate. The problem is in the interpretation of the stats. In sports, there can be a player who puts up HUGE stats, but chokes in crucial moments, and is not a good teammate. Still, some people will just look at the stats and vote him MVP. So the problem is people looking at the numbers on the surface, and not looking deeper to determine what they really mean. Accurate stats don’t lie; they just don’t tell the WHOLE story.

MAN!!! After all these years (we’re talking 50+ since grade school), that phrase, “Class, open your books to…” for some reason still fills me with an uncomfortable combination of dread and boredom.

One particularly bleak news day, CBC Radio Canada began its news report with, “Sadistics Canada reports today that …”

Doesn’t she know that 96% of all stats are made up on the spot…no wait I think it would be better to say 95% that sounds better.

“Projections” are only as good as the underlying assumptions on which they are based. Pure invention may be creative, but hardly represents a valid basis of prediction, though one that is too often used.

Sad but True:

She Could ace the year with only Half the effort she puts into Ducking the work.

“They” came to our company, and produced two graphs, which showed, over the last 10 million years or so, rise and fall in carbon dioxide levels, and rise and fall in global heat. This, They said, proved that as carbon dioxide levels rose, so did global heat. Well, no, it also showed that as global heat rose, so did carbon dioxide levels. They didn’t want to hear that.

We didn’t have a vice-principal in grade school. In middle school he was built like a linebacker and being sent there often meant you got paddled by him.

Wiley… Danae has sat on that bench so many times you need to show her name on a name plate on the back of the bench!