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..."
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