High Heels and Cephalopods
Posted in BLATHER & DRIVEL on 07/15/2010 02:23 pm by admin
Shoes… Oh my god, shoes.
Today’s NY Times correlates the height of women’s heels with the depths of economic difficulty. These bizarre correlations are coming to light increasingly often with the advent and widespread use of database technology. Where databases are designed, in part, to elucidate data trends, they often end up coughing up meaningless patterns. Comforted by the semblance of an orderly universe, human beings then graft significance on to connections which may or may not exist.
See also: Paul the Psychic Cephalopod. Paul risked the ire of the entire German people by predicting their performance in this year’s world cup. Is he psychic? See also: the difference between causation, correlation and out-and-out coincidence.