Hardened scientists should stop reading immediately.
The rest of you might enjoy a new book from Perigee, simply titled Correlated, in which author Shaun Gallagher promises to reveal “surprising connections between seemingly unrelated things.” For example, he reports:
The data used to draw these conclusions comes from more than 1 million responses of 36,305 people who answered questions on Gallagher’s website, Correlated.org. But he admits to flouting statistical rules like having a random sample (the people who answered his questions were self-selected) or addressing confounding variables (maybe pot-smokers fly first class because they’re rich and have extra money to spend on both those things). In his introduction to the book, out July 1, Gallagher outright says that his work “is not intended to stand up to professional scrutiny,” but rather is meant to be thought-provoking and plain old fun.
The whimsical statistics he presents on each page certainly put a new twist on “There are two kinds of people in this world …”, like people who have actually used a fire extinguisher and those who have only looked at them hanging on walls—or people who can’t bear to have foods touch on their plate and those who can go on living when the beans meet the rice.
Here is a sampling of other pseudo-scientific, delightful, totally unimportant findings from Gallagher’s book:
For more where this came from, you can pre-order the book.
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