Stuart Coles

Though Smartodds loves Statistics is in hibernation while we work out what direction it should take in the future, the current Coronavirus epidemic...

A year ago that I wrote a post explaining that one of the traditions of the Royal Statistical Society is that every year around Christmas it...

  The substance of this post, including the terrible joke in the finale, is all stolen from here. Look at this graph. The Santas represent...

  According to world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, the secret to his success is... ... I've just been lucky. Lucky? At chess? Well, no,...

  Friday 13th. What could possibly go wrong today? Well, according to people who suffer from Friggatriskaidekaphobia - the fear of Friday 13th...

  Do you like pizza? If so, I've got good and bad news for you. The good news is that the 2019 Ig Noble prize winner in the category of...

Stick a monkey on a typewriter, let him hit keys all day, and what will you get? Gibberish, probably. But what if you're prepared to wait longer...

  In a couple of earlier posts I've mentioned how statistical analyses have sometimes been used to demonstrate that results in published...

  Had you heard today is Black Friday. Or have you been living as a hermit in a cave without phone or access to emails for the last couple of...

You'll remember Venn diagrams from school. They're essentially a mathematical tool for laying out the information in partially overlapping sets. And...

  Suppose you can play on either of 2 slot machines: Slot machine A pays out with probability one in a million. Slot machine B pays out with...

  This blog is mostly about Statistics as a science rather than statistics as numbers. But just occasionally the statistics themselves are so...