Re: [LUG] Dr Midgley

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Hewson wrote:
> Isn't there a joke about a statistician who tried to board a plane with a
> bomb, because whilst the probability of a bomb being put on a plane was about
> 1 in 58 million the probabality of two bombs being put on a plane was
> infitessimally small.

Yes, but it is only funny because so few statisticians
understand Bayes theorem ;)

I prefer the one about the statistician, the engineer and the
philosopher, who are going to a conference in Edinburgh by
train. As they cross the scottish border the first sheep they
see from the train window is black. The statistician claims from
this sample that he can deduce that "all sheep in Scotland are
black", the engineer claims that you can only deduce that "at
least one sheep in scotland is black", and the philosopher
replies that "from this you can deduce only that one sheep in
scotland is black on one side".

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