Slashdot Mirror
Lies, Damned Lies and Cat Statistics
spopepro writes "While un-captioned cats might be of limited interest to the /. community, I found this column on how a fabricated statistic takes on a life of its own interesting. Starting with the Humane Society of the United States' (HSUS) claim that the unsterilized offspring of a cat will '...result in 420,000 cats in 5 years,' the author looks at other erroneous numbers, where they came from and why they won't go away."
When I was a kid, I used to sit there smashing mosquitoes that bit me. Every time I smashed one fat with blood, I relished the idea that I had just killed a female mosquito who was about to lay thousands of eggs. And those mosquitoes would in turn breed and lay thousands of eggs and I had essentially just ended the lives of an infinite number of mosquitoes!
Please, just let me have this -- your environmental constraints and logical reasoning be damned!
My work here is dung.
People who prefer dogs to cats are 4.8 times as likely to prefer Scotch to vodka, but people who prefer cats to dogs are equally likely to prefer Scotch or vodka.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
... in 3 million years you get a race of bipeds evolved from cats that are uber cool and fight wars over what colors their hats should be?