Cartoon

Silly me, I avoided emailing you this because I thought you'd think it frivolous.

i think more interesting is that on the same day, two nerd-adored cartoons had statistics-relevant jokes:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd020209s.gif
what's the joint probability density function of... whatever those two random variables are?

Usually the "best" punchline on xkcd comics is in the alt text (hover your mouse over the comic at: http://xkcd.com/539/ If people were sending you the direct link to the image they weren't even giving you a chance to read the whole joke.

The moment I read your comment I guessed this was likely to be xkcd.

There are two types of people in the world:

(1) those who pass around links to LOL xkcd comics, and

(2) those who receive these links and go "huh"?

For me, the cartoon was a bit of a shock because it came out the very morning I introduced boxplots in my intro stat course. I mentioned this in class, and showed them the cartoon, and they seemed genuinely amused.

Compare and contrast with the scatterplot blog response: http://scatter.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/i-think-this-is-my-favorite-stats-joke-ever/

That friggin cracked me up when I read it. I love the play on 'significant other' and 'statistical significance.' Come on Gellman, we've read your books, we know you a bit literal, but, in the words of my yard man, 'them shits funny.'

Thank you, J DeLong. I thought maybe I should get a CAT scan of my "old" brain. ^_^

Well she's clearly not part of his normal distribution of casual dates. I suspect a dependent relationship, clearly conditional on some prior interaction...

Sheesh!

I recieve something like this every day, I don't see any humor here too.

The sad thing is that they will probably end up getting married and staying together until they die.