I don’t know why, but academic economists just love to use cartoons in their presentations. I would guess that one out of three academic seminars includes a cartoon, and if it is a plenary talk, a cartoon is virtually guaranteed.
I don’t have anything specifically against cartoons, but to the best of my recollection, I have never in my life included one in my presentation, or linked to one from this blog — until today.
My former student Hays Golden sent me the following cartoon from xkcd.com, and it is so appropriate given the classes I have taught this term, that I can’t control my economist urges. I have no choice but to post it here on the blog:
From xkcd.com
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I work in the information security field, and this is a concept I have often tried to show my customers. XKCD does, in fact rule. It’s been a fav of mine for the last five or six months, and the insights on there just keep getting sharper.
XKCD has long been one of my favorite webcomics (thanks StumbleUpon!). It’s nice to see them referenced on here!
The hover (which is usually half the point of an xkcd comic) didn’t translate with the link…
When my roommate saw this on XKCD she immediately printed it off and posted it on the wall of our dorm room. Amusing to see that it’s making its rounds on the web.
As a connoisseur of irony, I’m particularly gratified that the comic has a joke within a joke, both of which exhibit irony. That’s hard to pull off.
I loved it. This is a recent cartoon that I really enjoyed also involving statistics: http://www.savagechickens.com/2009/03/love-stats.html
Btw I love this blog — took your class at UofC Spring 02 and some of these posts bring me back to those days.
As a statistician, I can tell you there are few good statistical joke, and this is one of the best…it captures both description (as in “a correlation exists between X and Y”) and probability (as in the existence of a relationship may or may not be the basis for making a given decision). Others address topics like central tendency (i.e., averages) and variability as in the story about the statistician who found himself with one foot in a bucket of boiling water, the other in ice water. When asked how he felt, he said, “on average, I’m OK, but the variability is killing me.”
Who would find such stories humorous? An answer appeared on a bumper sticker stuck to a colleague’s office door reading “statisticians are average lovers.” Someone, however, had crossed out ‘average’ with a felt-tip pen and replaced it with ‘mean.’ So much for central tendency.
Thanks for reposting this XKCD joke for all of your Freakonomics readers.
This is one of the funniest cartoons that I’ve seen in a long time and the esoteric punchline adds to the allure. I’ve shown it to some non-stats geeks and all I get is blank stares.