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'You're Never More Than 6ft From A Rat' & Other Dubious Statements

O

oll_lewis

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Feb 14, 2002
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There are loads of stats about that are often trotted out as facts that are rather unlikely to be true. For example "You're never more than 6 feet from a rat", "you only use 1/8 th of your brain" and "you must drink 8 glasses of water a day".

It's baffling, I know there are no rats within 6 feet of me curently, so dose just about everyone else out side of kensigton in liverpool (maybe thats what ups the advarage, in most areas kids use piles of jumpers for goal posts, in Kenny they use dead rats), yet gaurenteed every time people are talking about rats it'l get trotted out by some smartarse.

Dose anyone know where any of those stats come from in the first place or know anymore dubious stats like that?
 
Chef was most insistent today that 'people who wear hats go bald'. I tried to suggest he would be a wealthy man indeed, if he could prove who would and would not go bald before a test were carried out; he kind of glazed over.

Soong
 
ah so that would explane all those men walking around woth a full head of hair save for a narrow band of baldness around where the rim of a hat would be :nonplus:
 
Having spent most of today studying statistics and probablity as part of an OU course, I feel honour-bound to whitter on endlessly about such terms as "statistically significant", "mean", "median", "mode", "T-test", "D-test", "standard diviation", "normal distribrution" and many others whose names, let alone meanings, now escape me.

Anyway, it's all to do with averages. Apparently.

Jane.
 
what about the one that booze and smokes cause more deaths than illegal drugs?

i reckon this is true.

but maybe the percentage of people who die due to illegal drug abuse is greater than fags and booze?
 
stats are alwasy wierd things...and you might as well make em up half the time.(on average,lol)
 
Stats:
Never has so little been misunderstood so much
It's just numbers...
It's when you attach significance to what they represent that the trouble starts

Did you know that the majority of the pioneers of statistical methodologies all went stark-ravingly bonkers?
:)
 
In the words of a man so famous that I need not tell his name... there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.
:D

Jane.
 
Re: You're never more than 6 ft from a rat and other dubious

Lord_Flashheart said:
"you must drink 8 glasses of water a day".
Click to expand...

I think this one comes from research that was done in the fifties which showed that you need about 2.5 litres of fluid a day. What all those crappy womens mags and so on don't tell you is that you get a lot of that fluid from the food you eat.

But then they won't get advertising money from mineral water companies if they don't try to make us kill our kidneys will they?
 
10m from a rat, not 6ft! :D And that's only in the city of London, I believe. No idea if it's true. Probably not, unless there are rats at the top of the Post Office tower.

The 1/8th of the brain thing (1/10th, as usually stated) is a misquote, from somebody once saying that only 10% of the brain's potential is used. Again, I have no idea if this is true or not. It's certainly not true as applies to volume.

Drinking 8 glasses of water a day is indeed a good thing. Try it for a week and I guarantee you'll be feeling better.

One wonderful old wives tale that two (yes, two) friends of mine believe is that eating sugar gives you worms. Unfortunately I can't argue the point as I'm at a loss where to start.

But here's one I like: The number of stars in the universe is roughly equal to the number of grains of sand it would take to cover the British Isles to a depth of 10 inches. And that's just stars, not planets...
 
Heres another dubious stat and a clasic too :)

If you lay out all your entrails, nerves and blood vessles end to end (one for Gunter von-Hargen to try perhaps) around the equator, then it will wrap around the earth 3 and a half times :goof:

First of all who if anyone measured, second of all, if anyone did measure, why did they bother?
 
And have you heard that everytime you drink a glass of water you're drinking in one of Julius Ceaser's atoms.

Now, I think I remember that correctly.

It had something to do with there being more atoms in a human body than glasses of water on the planet.

hmmm

I suppose for this to work Julius would have to be spread out very thinly and very evenly and only in the sea! And by the same token you would be drinking an atom of everyone else who had shuffled off.

Where did I pick up this rubbish?
 
Another one I heard is that posts to threads entitled "more than 6 ft from a rat and other dubious stats" go randomly missing! i.e. I posted here yesterday and now it's gone!!!!!!
 
Where does this stuff come from?

The rats one and the guts being stretched around the world always gets me. How did they work that out.
But what about the one about the average person will swallow 8 large spiders in their lifetime due to large spiders sleeping in your mouth when it's open at night (when your're kipping). The image is ghastly: a spider with its legs splayed out across your open mouth enjoying the warmth of your breath-gross!!
Or what about the one about Loch Ness being able to fit the worlds population in it-I mean what the....!!
 
There's a thought/statistics/degrees of separation problem known as Caesar's Last Breath which you can find more about here....interesting. And it's all based on assumptions, which most statistical cliches like the rat thing are as well.
 
NOOOO!!!!

Lizard23, that is like thanks but no thanks! Jezuz that is sick-I was ranting over on a thread in chat on Insomnia-and that is really going to help me sleep-freezing cold night, warm into doors, mmm where are the spiders heading my warm house, my warm bed, my warm mouth ARGHHHHH!!!
 
Re: You're never more than 6 ft from a rat and other dubious

Lord_Flashheart said:
It's baffling, I know there are no rats within 6 feet of me curently, so dose just about everyone else out side of kensigton in liverpool (maybe thats what ups the advarage, in most areas kids use piles of jumpers for goal posts, in Kenny they use dead rats), yet gaurenteed every time people are talking about rats it'l get trotted out by some smartarse.
Click to expand...

L-FH: I think that is just Kennie ;)

The only time I have seen rats in the open was in France - make of that what you will ;)

---------------
I was wondering about the one about eating celery burning more calories than you get from it - this thread prompted me to look it up and by jingo its true:

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/celery.asp

Emps
 
UnfortunatelyI have to agree with the argument that stats can be pretty much used to prove anything if you know what you're doing. So I dont hold much faith in things like the rats one.
I do recall a comeadian once coming out with a fantastic take on stats though by stating that "two out of three people are wondering hwre the other one has got to".
 
Thanks Fallen Angel for the Caeser's breath link.

It goes to show how twisted it all became in my head since I heard it several years ago, probably another good reason not to trust oft quoted statistics.

How about Sturgeon's Law, "90% of everything is crap". That's one that generally stands up quite well.
 
Never more than 6ft from a rat

This is a total myth which stems from a complete guess someone made years and years ago (I think in the 1800's). There are actually more far more humans than rats in the UK. An estimate by the Mammal Society puts the figure somewhere around 9 million rats in the UK (if I remember rightly).
 
Er

I think that 9 million rats would be statiscally significant!
:)
 
Re: Never more than 6ft from a rat

mongoose said:
An estimate by the Mammal Society puts the figure somewhere around 9 million rats in the UK (if I remember rightly).
Click to expand...

according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom , the area of the UK is
244101 square kms, which is 244101 million square metres,
giving each rat an area of 244101 million/9 million
=27122 square metres,
which is approximately 165x165 metres.

So if all these rats were distributed evenly over the whole of the UK (which they obviously are not), you could never be more than about 82 metres from one.
 
Actually the one I heard was that you were never more than approximately 180 centimetres from a rat.
 
lizard23 said:
8 spiders a year apparently :
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.htm
Click to expand...

Now I hear that that one was made up by Stuart Marconie. You know the chap, if you've ever watched any on those 'I love 1978' type programes hes always on those.

Well in one interview with him he said that he made that one up in his early days as journalist, but it may have been a lie!
 
These wonderful but nonsensical "facts" are created by maths and statisitics students as both a mental excercise (using recorded figures) and a subject to bore people rigid at parties with in an attempt to show maths and statistics are really "cool"!

Hows about "The total population of Great Britain would fit on the Isle of Wight". Firstly, this relies on an average body size, minimum surface area and everybody able to stand up. Secondly, there is no possible excuse for any so-called scientist to have bothered calculating this and thirdly ...
The islanders would take shot-guns, pitchforks and flocks of attack-sheep to get rid of all "them bloody furriners!"
 
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