There’s nothing like a good joke
We (already!) have a Stat of the Week nomination, for the Herald’s
Conservative estimates are that the average man will lose 12,547 umbrellas during his lifetime.
At first sight this looks like deadpan humour rather than a statistic, but in that case you’d expect a by-line on the piece. The Google, which knows all and tells all, finds thirty other examples of the statistic. It looks as though the primary source is the Telegraph
Conservative and not at all plucked-out-of-thin-air estimates suggest that the average man will lose 12,547 umbrellas during his lifetime.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »