I’m not a big fan of statistics but I hear that the Icelanders are rather fond of them. I think we’re overwhelmed with stats that are more self serving than informative. But I digress…
The other night during my drive home a radio show had one of those conspiracy theory leaning alien visit guys on. Normally I would turn it off but I let it go for a while, to have a good laugh perhaps. This fellow and the host were dragging out a notion that a particular area of Canada experiences “about half” of the country’s UFO sightings. They managed to spend ten minutes repeating in different ways the suggestion that hmmm, this must mean something. From over “half” it became “around 50%” and finally “44 almost 45%”. OK, now tell me how big this area is. Oh, this area encompasses 43% of Canada.
So, considering that the prairies are so flat you can watch your dog as it runs away for a week, large parts of the country are uninhabited, and finally that urban areas are too bright to see much sky, I failed to see the significance of this juicy statistic. I wasted 10 minutes on something I would normally not give 10 seconds to and in the end I didn’t even get a good laugh.
