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Oct-18-2007 00:40

And they say statistics are meaningless :)

For those not familiar, Harper's Magazine publishes a list of funny, political statistics every month. As the proud blushing owner of a (lapsed but renewed) one-year subscription, I hereby pledge to post them every time I get a new one in the mail.

Sources for these references are available from the magazine. Check it out:

Number of different areas of US infrastructure graded by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2005: 15
Average grade and highest grade, respectively, that the group gave out: D, C+

Amount that poor roads cost Americans in repairs and other extra operating costs each year: $67 000 000 000
Estimated amount needed over the next twenty years to maintain US sewer systems: $390 000 000 000
Percentage change since 1990 in the average size of an American master bathroom: +50
Percentage change since 1980 in the average amount of solid waste generated by an American: +24
Number of square feet of US self-storage space built since 1998: 1 000 000 000

Number of US colleges that have closed since 1990: 228
Number of the 17 Islamic universities in sub-Saharan Africa that have been founded in the past 10 years: 10

Age at which most German children are slotted into high schools: 10
Chance that a child of immigrants to Germany is granted a spot at a college preparatory high school: 1 in 7
Chance for all German children: 1 in 3

Percentage change since 2004 in US immigration to Canada: +46
Percentage change since then in total retail sales in Crawford, Texas: -27

Percentage disapproval rating for George W. Bush in July: 66
Ratings for Harry Truman in 1952 and Richard Nixon in 1974, respectively, the only presidents ever to climb so high: 67, 66

Chance that a CEO who left one of the top 2500 global companies in 1995 was forced out: 1 in 8
Chance in 2006: 1 in 3

(more, ahead)

Oct-18-2007 00:59

Number of Wal-Mart employees on whom the company secretly took out life insurance policies from 1993 to 1995: 350 000
Minimum number of deceased employees on whom the firm has collected: 453

Head of cattle that fidelity investments keeps on a portion of its corporate campus near Fort Worth: 25
Amount it thereby saves in taxes through a Texas "agricultural" exemption: $328 000

Minimum amount that religious groups received in congressional earmarks between 2003 and 2006: $209 000 000
Total amount such groups received during the previous fourteen years: $107 000 000

Number of times this year that US media have called Gen. David Peraeus "King David": 24
Number of times they have called him a "warrior intellectual" or "warrior scholar": 26

Minimum number of books about the Iraq war published in the United Stated so far: 835
Number of these that are children's books: 32
Number of copies a book of poems must sell per week to make the Poetry Foundation's bestseller list: 50

Rank of Richard Dawkins's 'The God Delusion' among Amazon.co.uk's top-selling "Religion and Spirituality" books this year: 1
Rank of Christopher Hitchens's 'God is not Great': 2
Number of copies of Pope Benedict XVI's book 'Jesus of Nazareth' has sold in the United States: 68 000
Estimated number of pieces of silver that could be bought with the royalties: 21 250
Total amount that US Catholic Dioceses have paid out since 2002 in child sex-abuse settlements: $1 073 000 000

Number of different reasons for having sex, as identified this year in a University of Texas study: 273
Number of escort services and McDonald's restaurants, respectively, in Washington, D.C.: 26, 23

Percentage change in the average amount of food a person will consume when eating with one other person: +35
Percentage change with four or seven others, respectively: + 75, + 96

Oct-18-2007 01:07

Number of kernels of corn it takes to make the corn syrup used in one kernel: 8:1l of candy corn: 3
Ratio of the number of calories in a candy-corn kernel to the number in a real corn kernel: 8:1

Figures are current as of August 2007.

Fun with numbers, huh? I paid for my subscription, but like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I'm happy to give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now. And there ain't no fleas on my Keidis, neither :)

Discuss.

Oct-18-2007 06:39

dublew - eych - ay - teee????

Oct-18-2007 07:49

My response to the above post:
Fee-fee-fee-fee-fee-feene!

Oct-18-2007 21:26

thats a whole lot of....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

stats.

Oct-18-2007 23:39

67% of snoring Bostonians never get into law school and suffer decades of repeating infamous post-indiscretion runny-mascara-spare-change-begging-episodes :)

Reading stats means never going commando or without bus fare.