A few weeks ago my post “The Joke’s On You” caused an almighty controversy raging for many days and becoming increasingly irate. I note that Tom Leith has just posted a new comment to that post. Since the post is now old, if not dead, and will be revisited by very few people, I thought I’d post Tom Leith’s new joke to the main site, as a post in its own right. I suspect that this is intended purely for light relief and should not be the cause of renewed controversy – unless there are some very over-sensitive stastisticians lacking a sense of humour visiting the site.

Here’s Tom’s comment and joke:

This exists in many forms, but to lighten the mood here:

Several faculty are called in to see their dean. Just as they arrive the dean is called out of his office, leaving the three professors there. They notice a small fire in the wastebasket.

The physicist says, “I know what to do! We must cool down the materials until their temperature is lower than the ignition temperature and then the fire will go out.”

The chemist says, “No! No! I know what to do! We must cut off the supply of oxygen so that the fire will go out due to lack of one of the reactants.”

“We can do both at the same time if we hit it with a big bucket of water.” says the engineer.

While they debate what course to take, they are alarmed to see the statistician running around the room starting more fires. They both scream, “What are you doing!?!”

To which the statistician replies, “Trying to get an adequate sample size.”