I recently stumbled upon an amusing–yet also somewhat morbid–compilation of charts that show “spurious correlations” between two completely unrelated data sets. The charts were created by Tyler Vigen, and I thought I’d share a few of them here today.
First, I’m a little spooked that so many people die from becoming tangled in their bedsheets! That’s one more thing to worry about. This is the one spurious correlation that truly made me wonder–is there a real correlation here? Perhaps cheese inherently impacts how we sleep in such a way that it increases the chance we’ll get dangerously tangled?
I’m actually glad to see here that so few people drown while fishing–it seems like it could be a dangerous activity. As for how it relates to marriage rates in Kentucky, I’m not sure.
This one falls into the category of: Just in case there’s a real correlation here, shouldn’t Scripps keep the words in the last round to 10 letters or less? Yes, there’s no real connection at all, but just in case…
Have you seen any of these? What’s your favorite (and your takeaway from it)?
My favorite misleading chart is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#/media/File:PiratesVsTemp(en).svg – there is just so much mind-boggling about every dimension of it 🙂
PS. The URL on that got cut-off, so you may need to copy/paste to include the final .svg
That’s amazing. 🙂
Wouldn’t it be interesting if Tyler Vigen actually hit on a correlation that some government (ours, another country, etc) has engineered, and if he’s now on someone’s watch list? Maybe the US government REALLY DID want to lower Alabama marriage rates and they REALLY DID find a way to do it by increasing whole milk consumption. Think about it. If someone asked you if you’d like to lower Alabama marriage rates, might you be compelled to say yes? (Cue some kind of spooky music — like the opening music to the X-Files.)