Mind-Blowing Stats / Facts

[The Doctor]

Here’s a stat from my 8 year old grandson Sam which, once heard, you’ll never forget. His book of 365 stats informs us that the Atlantic Ocean increases in width each year by exactly the amount that the average toe-nail grows.

This (well similar) was a line in used in my first year lecture on sea floor spreading for many years. The other way I put this, which I prefer because it is my visual and performative, is that in an average human lifetime the Atlantic Ocean widens by the roughly width of your outstretched arms.

 

[mervyn]

UY Scuti is a star so large, it would take a passenger jet flying at 700 miles per hour 20,000 years to go around its equator once.

Just read up on the detail. Mind blowing

 

[Quinny]

Not quite a mind-blowing fact, but one which I found really interesting, was that King Phillip II of Spain, he who launched the Armada in 1588, actually started the rebuilding process of the English navy when he was jure uxoris King of England between 1554 - 1558. The English navy was apparently in a really poor state as very little had been invested in it since the reign of Henry VIII.

 

[Jon with no H]

I thought it was a fair bit more than that, what with the Mid-Atantic Ridge pushing everything apart, but I'm not going to argue with an eight-year-old with a book in his hand!

I remember being told in 1992 by my chemistry teacher that tectonic plates moved at the same rate toenails grow, so clearly there has been a lot of research on the topic.

I don't think he was involved in the research, and none of that has anything to do with chemistry, but to bring this back to the randomness/probability chat, he also once tossed a coin to determine which one of two pieces of homework he would mark.

 

[mervyn]

It is worth remembering that 46.2% of all stats are made up on the spot!

 

[mervyn]

Apparently this was borne out in the women’s World Cup where the squad size was 23 and the right number of squads had two players with the same birthdays to prove it.

Can anyone explain this? For the 12 years leading to my retirement I sent every employee a birthday card every year. The numbers employed waxed and waned from 76 minimum to 91 maximum. During that period not a single birthday occurred during the month of August. I have checked through ONS and statistically there is no difference in total national numbers born for each month. The company was located in Exeter (cue a gag there) and had a typical male/female mix. Any suggestions?

 

[MickyD]

I remember being told in 1992 by my chemistry teacher that tectonic plates moved at the same rate toenails grow, so clearly there has been a lot of research on the topic.

I don't think he was involved in the research, and none of that has anything to do with chemistry, but to bring this back to the randomness/probability chat, he also once tossed a coin to determine which one of two pieces of homework he would mark.

Yes, on reflection, I would guess that toenails grow maybe an inch a year, and that was roughly the figure I had in mind for the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. So no conflict with mervyn's grandson after all - phew!

 

[MickyD]

Can anyone explain this? For the 12 years leading to my retirement I sent every employee a birthday card every year. The numbers employed waxed and waned from 76 minimum to 91 maximum. During that period not a single birthday occurred during the month of August. I have checked through ONS and statistically there is no difference in total national numbers born for each month. The company was located in Exeter (cue a gag there) and had a typical male/female mix. Any suggestions?

Was there perhaps a nookie embargo in Exeter every November? Perhaps other posters would like to speculate on possible reasons?

 

[Ave IT]

Can anyone explain this? For the 12 years leading to my retirement I sent every employee a birthday card every year. The numbers employed waxed and waned from 76 minimum to 91 maximum. During that period not a single birthday occurred during the month of August. I have checked through ONS and statistically there is no difference in total national numbers born for each month. The company was located in Exeter (cue a gag there) and had a typical male/female mix. Any suggestions?

I’ll have a go at working out the odds, fag-packet style.

You say number of employees ranged from 76 to 91 – so let’s assume an average of 84. Lets also assume you took on a new employee every 8 months (3 every two years) for 12 years …. So in all the number of people employed at some point was 84+ 18 = 102 employees.

Now the chances anybody NOT having a birthday in August is 11 in 12 (ignoring the fact not all months have the same number of days for simplicity) = 0.916 (or 91.6%).

This means that the chance s of none of those 102 employees having an August birthday is 0.916 x 0.916 x 0.916 x….. for 102 times or mathematically = 0.916^102 = 0.0001298 (or 0.01298%).

However, there are 12 months of the year that this could have happened in so the chances of any month catching your attention like this is multiplied by 12 (you'd have said the same if it was June say) so the actual chance is 0.001298 x 12 = 0.001558 or approximately 0.16%.

So yes, it is of course very unlikely – but not ridiculous. It’s about the same chance as you being selected if they randomly chose 25 people from the crowd of 16,000 people at Home Park.

The other thing to remember is that as we go through our lives we have many opportunities (almost infinite) for weird and wonderful things to happen to us that have a tiny probability but we will only ever notice the ones that do. In other words – it would actually be bizarre if weird ‘coincidences’ didn’t happen to you at some time or another, yet when they do the temptation is to marvel about it and put some mystical significance on them (not that I'm saying you are here).

 

[Mat]

Perhaps he always took August as holiday and therefore sent no cards that month.