Saturday, November 14, 2009

Spurious Correlation of the Week


The lesson here is not that Pitchfork's editors should get behind "Drill, baby, drill." The lesson is that US oil production has fallen steadily for 40 years, and Rolling Stone's editors are absurdly biased toward songs written between 1965 and 1980.
 This is from a blog at the The Atlantic that is borrowed from the The Gawker.  And I got it from a facebook link by Peter Trumbore (hat tips to all).

I enjoy such spurious correlations so I ask my readers to send me links to graphs or graphs themselves of such things.

2 comments:

MG said...

some bookmarks...

http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/10/14/the-blockbuster-bell-curve/
http://www.overthinkingit.com/2009/02/03/steelers-and-steel-sports-teams-and-their-respective-commodities/
http://www.mrscienceshow.com/2009/05/correlation-of-week-zombies-vampires.html (personally suspected this a while back-- a notable correlation between zombie films and republicans in power versus vampire films and democrats in power)
http://thisisindexed.com/ (dubious data-sets...)
http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/1016984 (although there might be something to this)

Anonymous said...

Both are more correlated as you might think!

Global wealth and consumption is closely related to our fossil fuel industry.
Music is one of the items consumed in this wealthy period.
Both oil and music are in a transition fase weakening demand by increasing Green Power alternatives, electric cars being used. Same but different applies to music where music producers have difficulty earning money with music as digital music like streaming etc. has nearly killed sales of CD's...
Regards, Bely Bob