(PNS reporting from CAMBRIDGE, MASS) Did you know that the more lawyers there are in Puerto Rico, the more people die from falling out of their beds?
That’s the startling statistical relationship discovered by the prestigious Harvard Law-school-based Spurious Correlations Institute, one of many recently revealed on their website.
Here are the raw numbers the Institute employed to make the graph:
| 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | ||
| People who died by falling out of their bed Deaths (US) (CDC) |
400 | 450 | 516 | 551 | 594 | 503 | 621 | 626 | 690 | 737 | 780 | |
| Number of lawyers in Puerto Rico Lawyers (ABA) |
9,892 | 10,195 | 11,071 | 10,947 | 11,209 | 11,191 | 11,805 | 11,767 | 12,142 | 12,454 | 13,071 | |
| Correlation: 0.975871 | ||||||||||||
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Institute Director Tyler Vigen told PNS. “It’s all there in black and white. And sometimes in red and yellow, green and blue.”
“Check this out,” he said. “As Americans slowly weaned themselves off imported oil from Venezuela, they also decreased their consumption of unhealthy High Fructose Corn Syrup. Where’s your revolution now, Bolivarian Chavistas?”
| 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | ||
| US crude oil imports from Venezuela Millions of barrels (Dept. of Energy) |
446 | 471 | 438 | 436 | 473 | 449 | 416 | 420 | 381 | 352 | |
| Per capita consumption of high fructose corn syrup (US) Pounds (USDA) |
62.6 | 62.5 | 62.8 | 60.9 | 59.8 | 59.1 | 58.2 | 56.1 | 53 | 50.1 | |
| Correlation: 0.884883 | |||||||||||
Other correlations from the Institute show these results:
- US spending on science, space, and technology correlates with Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation
- Divorce rate in Mississippi correlates with Murders by bodily force
- Number people who drowned by falling into a swimming-pool correlates with Number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in
“Numbers don’t lie,” Vigen insisted, “although they sometimes can mislead — like this woman’s phone number I got Saturday night at the Cantab Lounge. Mansplainers Anonymous Hotline? Golly!”
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