Bird’s Eye: No! Don’t skip this! Really, statistics can be simple, amusing, and fun. Just look at the absurd cover Wired put out last month, or read a classic piece by Mark Twain on extrapolation. And the Guardian has a very clever piece on the difference between correlation and causation, reminding us that two variables may be linked, but that does NOT mean one causes the other. Hey, where did everyone go?

* Wired Screwed Up Suicide Cover

* Mobile Phone Masts Linked To Sharp Rise In Births The Guardian

Do mobile phone towers make people more likely to procreate? Could it be possible that mobile phone radiation somehow aids fertilisation, or maybe there’s just something romantic about a mobile phone transmitter mast protruding from the landscape? These questions are our natural response to learning that variation in the number of mobile phone masts across the country exactly matches variation in the number of live births. For every extra mobile phone mast in an area, there are 17.6 more babies born above the national average.

…. The match between mobile phone towers and birth rates is an extremely strong correlation and it is highly statistically significant. There is no doubting the mathematical finding that more mobile phone masts mean that there will also be more births. This is about as rigorous as statistics can get.

Mobile phone masts, however, have absolutely no bearing on the number of births. There is no causal link between the masts and the births despite the strong correlation. Both the number of mobile phone transmitters and the number of live births are linked to a third, independent factor: the local population size. As the population of an area goes up, so do both the number of mobile phone users and the number people giving birth….

*Extrapolation Mark Twain

One of the Mississippi’s oddest peculiarities is that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals…..

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.