Stats Trivia

In honor of my take home stats exam, I decided to post some random but interesting trivia from my stats book. It was just printed in 2007, so I guess these stats are accurate...

The most popular birthdate is October 5th, which correlates with a New Year's Eve conception.
The least common birthdate is May 22. Apparently the sweltering heat that is August 18 doesn't hold the same charm or drunkenness as New Year's Eve.

It takes 7 shuffles of a deck of cards to get a complete mixture.

Florence Nightingale, the founder of the nursing profession, saved thousands of lives by using statistics. She developed graphs that showed that during the Crimean War more soldiers died as a result of unsanitary conditions than were killed in battle. This led to widespread medical reform.

According to Health magazine, these are the average measurements of mannequins and women:
Mannequin height = 6 ft.
Women height = 5 ft. 4 in.
Mannequin waist = 23 in.
Women waist = 29 in.
Mannequin hip size = 34 in.
Women hip size = 40 in.
Mannequin dress size = 6
Women dress size = 11

There is a Cost of Laughing Index (CLI) which tracks costs of items such as rubber chickens, Groucho Marx glasses, admissions to comedy clubs and 13 other leading humor indicators.

In classes of 25 students, there is better than 50% chance that at least two students will share the same brithday (day and month).

Shakespeare's writings include 31,534 words and probability theory concludes that Shakespeare probably knew at least another 35,000 words that he didn't use in his writings.