Margarine linked to divorce!

A Harvard teacher has come up with an extraordinary hypothesis:  That the amount of margarine consumed in a household is directly correlated to the rate of divorce.

Wow!  Maybe it's something to do with not enjoying nice things (i.e. butter), or not having enough money to buy good food (i.e. butter)?

Well, er, no.  A little further investigation into the story helps us find that it's on a website called 'Spurious Correlations' on which this Harvard teacher finds weird and wonderful correlations between  completely unrelated sets of statistics, and just publishes them to get us all talking.

For instance, cheese eating rises directly in relation to the number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets....

Or how about this one - in summer, ice cream sales and the number of murders both increase...

So what, if anything, does this sensational headline tell us?  Perhaps to be wary of statistics!

Remember Mark Twain's line:  "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics..."

To have and to hold and to appear on TV...

If you were minded to, there are lots of ways you could find a 'lifetime partner'...  You could:

• Go on a blind date
• Meet them at work
• Be partnered off by your friends
• Bump into them walking the dog
• Go online dating
• Sign up for a TV show

So you don't believe the last one?  Well, you should!  Channel 4 have commissioned a TV programme called Married At First Sight which is based on a Danish format.  And it's for real!  A pool of 200 people will be assessed and matched by a panel of experts, leading to 6 strangers being married to each other live on television, having never clapped eyes on each other before.

Be warned if you fancy meeting your forever partner this way though - in the Danish show, none of the couples managed even a year.  So, whilst 'love' may not hold us together, it seems getting married on TV won't do it either...

Fancy a quickie?

This week an online divorce website boasting that it is the 'leading provider' of online divorces has been told to stop making the claim as it can't substantiate it.

The company made the claim on the Quickie Divorce YouTube channel (yes, really, there is one) in a video with a woman speaking to the camera claiming that the site was 'firmly established' as the UK's leading provider of online divorces.

They claimed that of 32,025 divorces filed between April and June of last year, they had 'assisted people' on 6,486 cases, giving them 22.5% of the market share.

The Advertising Standards Authority pointed out that 'assisting people' is not quite the same as 'filing' and that there were no statistics to show how many people were 'assisted' by other law firms.  Bit like comparing apples and oranges really!

Honestly, rather than 'have a quickie' it's probably easier to speak to a real live human being...