Dhoni vs
Bevan continued
Not
everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be
counted – Albert Einstein
Incidentally
I am planning to provide a very important piece of statistics for the nation
and police department in general for the New Year 2015 i.e. as usually many
people drink on 31st December evening /night and drive and some end up dying in
accident, statistically speaking 31st December is a great health hazard as it
causes maximum deaths on roads and hence roads must be closed to all traffic
Every war
has collateral damages; every love affair has incidental beneficiaries at least
the peanut vendor in beaches.
The great
game of cricket is similarly the great collateral damage /incidental benefit
that seeped into the subcontinent due to colonialism. Thankfully people in the
subcontinent did not take to golf or rugby with similar interest and
involvement and hence naturally did not shine in them. What could have been the
reasons? There could be many. I do not venture to evaluate them based on
statistics.
Cutting
short and coming to cricket as we have adopted it and also have performed well
in it we can appreciate its many facets which render it amenable to be
scientifically analyzed and artistically appreciated as a great sport.
Reducing it
to statistics is doing injustice to the game and its important facets its
scientific techniques, its artistic skills, its many marvelous inherent
dynamics and dimensions.
Why at all
Sports, science and anything and everything will have to be subjected to
justification through statistics- a pseudo science?
Being in a
predominantly statistics driven industry, namely Insurance whose back bone is
said to be actuaries I can say the whole
insurance business, if analyzed without any prejudice anyone can make out has
its swings, upward and downward purely based on economic factors and market
trends and not based on the products offered after all statistically analyzed number
crunching and logical reasoning.
Statistically
speaking Sachin is the best batsman ever produced by India but he can never be
placed ahead of Sunil Gavaskar or Rahul Dravid in terms of technical
perfection; cannot be compared with V.V.S.Lakshman and Azharuddhin in wrist
work and ability to score of any ball anywhere on the onside; can never come
anywhere near Srikanth and Shewag in flamboyance; can never be like Ganguly in
reading the opposition and outsmarting them in marshalling his resources. I am
confining my comparisons with batsmen within India who played mostly in his
era.
I would like
to maintain that Bevan was one of the best sprinters with pads on who could
also play some shots with the bat.
Even
statistically here is a very relevant statistical account.
I would
therefore like to reiterate my old write up which was written the after the
argument in my blog
and also
provide below some interesting take on statistics as a subject, all culled from
the internet which I found very interesting.
A
statistician is a person who draws a mathematically precise line from an
unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.
One passed
by Gary Ramseyer:
Statistics
play an important role in genetics. For instance, statistics prove that numbers
of offspring is an inherited trait. If your parent didn't have any kids, odds
are you won't either.
One day
there was a fire in a wastebasket in the office of the Dean of Sciences. In
rushed a physicist, a chemist, and a statistician. The physicist immediately
starts to work on how much energy would have to be removed from the fire to
stop the combustion. The chemist works on which reagent would have to be added
to the fire to prevent oxidation. While they are doing this, the statistician
is setting fires to all the other wastebaskets in the office. "What are
you doing?" the others demand. The statistician replies, "Well, to
solve the problem, you obviously need a larger sample size."
Quoted by
Steve Simon, www.pmean.com, and attributed to Gary C. Ramseyer's First Internet
Gallery of Statistics Jokes at www.ilstu.edu/~gcramsey/Gallery.html
A
statistician confidently tried to cross a river that was 1 meter deep on
average. He drowned.
It is proven
that the celebration of birthdays is healthy. Statistics show that those people
who celebrate the most birthdays become the oldest. -- S. den Hartog, Ph D.
Thesis Universtity of Groningen.
I remember
seeing George Burns on TV being interviewed on his 100th birthday. He was
puffing on a cigar. The interviewer made some comment about the incongruity of
longevity and smoking. George Burns: "Twenty years ago my doctor told me
that these cigars were going to kill me" Interviewer: "What does he
say now?" George Burns: "I don't know. He's dead" – Thylacoleo
Two
statisticians were traveling in an airplane from LA to New York. About an hour
into the flight, the pilot announced that they had lost an engine, but don’t
worry, there are three left. However, instead of 5 hours it would take 7 hours
to get to New York.
A little
later, he announced that a second engine failed, and they still had two left,
but it would take 10 hours to get to New York.
Somewhat
later, the pilot again came on the intercom and announced that a third engine
had died. Never fear, he announced, because the plane could fly on a single
engine. However, it would now take 18 hours to get to New York.
At this
point, one statistician turned to the other and said, “Gee, I hope we don’t
lose that last engine, or we’ll be up here forever!”
Statistics
means never having to say you’re certain.
Statistics
is the art of never having to say you’re wrong.
Variance is
what any two statisticians are at.
It’s like
the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell
rabbit sandwiches so cheap. “Well,” he explained, “I have to put some
horse-meat in too. But I mix them 50:50. One horse, one rabbit.” (Darrel Huff,
How to Lie with Statistics)
A
statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say
that on the average he feels fine.
3 out of 4
Americans make up 75% of the population.
Death is 99
per cent fatal to laboratory rats.
A
statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say
that on the average he feels fine.
Fett’s Law:
Never replicate a successful experiment.
A Greater
Than Averge Number of Legs
The great
majority of people have more than the average number of legs. Amongst the 57
million people in Britain there are probably 5,000 people who have only one
leg. Therefore the average number of legs is
(5000 x 1 + 56,995,000 x 2)/57,000,000 =
1.9999123.
The Ten
Commandments of Statistical Inference
1. Thou shalt not hunt statistical
inference with a shotgun.
2. Thou shalt not enter the valley of the
methods of inference without an experimental design.
3. Thou shalt not make statistical
inference in the absence of a model.
4. Thou shalt honor the assumptions of thy
model.
5. Thy shalt not adulterate thy model to
obtain significant results.
6. Thy shalt not covet thy colleagues’
data.
7. Thy shalt not bear false witness
against thy control group.
8. Thou shalt not worship the 0.05
significance level.
9. Thy shalt not apply large sample
approximation in vain.
10. Thou shalt not infer causal relationships
from statistical significance.
A statistician is …someone who
insists on being certain about uncertainty – Unknown
someone who
doesn’t know what he’s talking about and
make you feel it’s your fault – Unknown *
A woman hears from her doctor that
she has only half a year to live. The doctor advises her to marry a
statistician and to live in South Dakota. The woman asks, “Will this cure my
illness?” Answer of the doctor, “No, but the half year will seem pretty long” –
Unknown *
A statistician and the
statistician’s wife were marooned on a remote island. When the wife asked how
they were going to escape the island and get home, the statistician replied …
“Assuming we had a boat…”
Statistics
are fiction in its most uninteresting form – Evan Esar
Statistics
is
The science
that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics – Evan Esar
The art of
lying by means of figures – William
Stekel
Like a
bikini - what they reveal is suggestive but what they conceal is vital –Aaron
Levenstein
The straw
out of which I, like every other economist, have to make the bricks – A.
Marshall
Yet another
mistress to deceive us – Spanish proverb
Statistics
may be defined as ‘a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty’
– W.A. Wallis
Ten per cent
of all car thieves are left-handed. All Polar bears are left-handed. If your
car is stolen, there’s a ten per cent chance it was nicked by a Polar bear –
Unknown *
There are three kinds of lies: lies,
damned lies, and statistics – Benjamin Disraeli
There are two kinds of statistics:
the kind you look up and the kind you make up – Rex Stout
Torture numbers, and they'll confess
to anything – Gregg Easterbrook
Top ten reasons to become a
statistician … *
- deviation
is considered normal
- we feel
complete and sufficient
- we are
“mean” lovers
-
statisticians do it discretely and continuously
- we are
right 95 per cent of the time
- we can
legally comment on someone's posterior distribution
- we may not
be normal but we are transformable
- we never
have to say we are certain
- we are
honestly significantly different
- no one
wants our jobs
I have
omitted some very interesting adults’ only statistics jokes which I normally
share with the officers of actuarial department.
