Fun with curve-fitting
These are the great results you can get if you look backwards at brief intervals of data and don't check your results by hypothesizing a causal mechanism, making a prediction, and finding out whether your curves match into the future. For instance, there is an uncanny ten-year correlation between the number of letters in the winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee and the number of people killed by venomous spiders.
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Along those lines is this claim, made by a female student, that my wife heard in a graduate (!) statistics class: "Whether I have a baby or not is independent of whether my mother has a baby or not."
Eric Hines
That’s a great example. True today, true for all possible tomorrows; and true yesterday, and for a great many yesterdays that might be in your sample! And yet...
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