Parting Thoughts

The Parting Thoughts feature typically features reflective quotations on, well, just about anything. But in earlier days of e-AIR, the Parting Thoughts section often included jokes or humorous quotations. Indeed, a little laughter might be a welcome respite from the serious planning and budgeting discussions in which many of us are currently engaged. Linda Lorenz, an analyst in the Office of Institutional Research at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (llorenz@umn.edu) sent the following e-mail:

I'm not sure if you would include jokes about statisticians in "The Electronic AIR", but a friend of mine (a college freshmen) shared a few with me. (She's a budding mathematician or physicist - still undecided which way to go.) I shared the jokes with the IR folks here at the University of Minnesota, and the jokes were "enjoyed", so I thought I'd pass them along.

The jokes were originally found here:

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5683&sid=f1213ceb62baf888042bbaf66cba8e8f

Joke#1:

An engineer, a physicist and a statistician are in a hotel when a fire starts.

"Pour water on it!" Cries the engineer

"No, remove the oxygen!" Says the physicist.

The statistician, seeing their disagreement, frantically runs round the hotel starting fires.

"What the heck are you doing?" The other two ask.

"Creating a decent sample size."

Joke#2: Changed for Minnesotans:

Two statisticians are out deer hunting. They come across a large buck. The first statistician aims and fires. Unfortunately, he missed, and the bullet went about twelve inches to the left of the deer. The second statistician fires, but the bullet goes about a foot to the right of the deer.

The second statistician puts down his gun and says, "All right! We got him!"

Linda, thank you for sending these jokes along. Reader contributions of Parting Thoughts are most welcome! Send them to Marne Einarson (mke3@cornell.edu).