quote: *A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds *A duck's quack does not echo
Both of these were on the show Mythbusters and shown to be false. Goldfish were trained to go through a maze. And the sound waves in a duck's quack were shown to resemble the echo a lot, but the echo was definitely there.
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posted
Mythbusters also disproved that Hotel Keyguards are corrupted by magnets adn credit cards. I personally have proven this to BE true. therefore, mythbusters sucks.
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quote: Most importantly, being above average is just that, above the mathematical average. To obey all traffic laws and be an excellent driver in a manner of skill would make a driver near perfect. In terms of a bell curve model, I believe the humor of the above factoid makes much more sense.
Ergo: You do not need to be a perfect driver to be "above average", you just need to be better than 50% of the drivers out there.
Vis-a-vis: Since 70% of drivers believe themselves to be "above average", this becomes mathematically impossible since we might arbitrarily establish that the top 25% or 30% of drivers on a bell curve to be considered above average.
70% of drivers can be above average, let me show you how:
you don't need to be better than 50% to be above average, that would be above the median. You would just have to be above the average skill amount. For example lets say there are only 4 people, and their driving skills are rated on a 1 to 10 scale. Their skill levels are: 1, 8, 9, and 10. Makeing an average of 7, which 75% of the people are above. and keeping into account the people under the age of legel driving, and over the age of experianced driving, and people who do not know how to drive(including people from other countries), making it highly possible that the people who consider themselves above average drivers really are above average.
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posted
Quick refresher for those who have forgotten their statistics, please: What is the mode?
I know mean is the sum of the values divided by the number of value (used for GPAs, it's what most people think of as the average).
Median is simply the value for which there are an equal number of higher and lower values in a set of values (or the average of the two middle values when needed). I'm not sure of all the details for special situations, such as when what would be the median value is present multiple times but not evenly spread about the middle.
I have no idea what mode is, however. I used to know, but apparantly I've never had to make use of it before in a non-academic setting.
On a side note, the idea of an average driver may be impossible on it's face, since there are so many factors contrubiting to what makes someone a good driver. Any attempt to reduce it to a single value is doomed to failure.
posted
Here's a fun fact that I learned the other day.
You know how there are some American Beer companies that have been around for over 100 years? I always wondered how they survived the prohibition. But now I know!
Coors, for example, survived by selling malted milk to Mars candy. Malted milk is pretty much just malt (pre-fermented beer) mixed with cream. Mars' first candy bar was the Milky Way, named for the Coors malted milk.
So it seems that the prohibition is responsible for a lot of the malted milk products that we eat now. When you eat Whoppers, you are eating creamy pre-beer.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
The mode is the value that occurs the most times. There was no mode in the data set example that MEC provided above, but if we expand his set to 1,2,2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 there is one -- and still 70% of the sample is above it.
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I know. Today, the first thing the corporate suits would do would be to lay off half of their employees, and *then* try to figure out how to stay in buisness.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Hey man I don't know, but the toungue works by itself, where as other muscles depend on one another, and your bones in order to work at all. Besides, isn't the toungue your most exersized muscle? You use it every day to eat, talk, kiss, etc.
posted
- There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
- You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.
- Americans on the average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
- The flea can jump 350 times its body length. That is like a human jumping the length of a football field.
- A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death.
- Every time you lick a stamp you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
- You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.
- Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.
- In ancient Egypt, Priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.
- A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
- The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.
- The lifespan of a tastebud is ten days.
- On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.
- Non-dairy creamer is flammable.
- On average people fear spiders more than they do death.
- If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.
- If you fart consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.
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Like the fact that its still legal to shoot someone with a bow and arrow if caught climbing over Chester (England) city walls between midnight and six in the morning.
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Alaska law says that you can't look at a moose from an airplane
In Miami, it is forbidden to imitate an animal
In Illinois, the law is that a car must be driven with the steering wheel
In Memphis, Tennessee, a woman is not to drive a car unless a man warns approaching motorists or pedestrians by walking in front of the car that is being driven
In Tennessee, it is against the law to drive a car while sleeping
In Utah, birds have the right of way on any public highway.
In Virginia, the Code of 1930 has a statute which prohibits corrupt practices or bribery by any person other than political candidates
In Washington State, you can't carry a concealed weapon that is over 6 feet in length.
The law states that more than 3000 sheep cannot be herded down Hollywood Blvd. at any one time.
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posted
Dagonee, The mode is the most frequently used number, basically. Sometimes, there is no mode.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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My favorite fact in the world--has anyone said this yet?
Myoclonic twitch = when you're sort of half asleep and dreaming, and in the dream you step down or move your hand, and you try to do it in real life too, and it jerks you back all the way awake
posted
I learned the other day, that if you're forced, somehow, to sneeze with your eyes ope, your eyes pop out of their sockets. My chemistry teacher said that it was true.
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