Statistically Speaking by Adam, Tøm
May 18th, 2008 2:28 PMThere are a lot of stereotypes us residents would associate with our town; fat, old, chav-filled, pigeon-y all smothered in chip fat. But is Yarmouth really like that? Or are we just focusing on the bad parts? We aimed to find out.
Part 1: There are huge amounts of pigeons in Great Yarmouth.
We set up camp on a bench in Great Yarmouth Market place and counted how many pigeons landed within the space of a minute. We then repeated this for 5 separate minutes, and averaged the numbers.
Consider it disproved, -0.2 pigeons landed? That's right. We have anti-matter pigeons.
We probably should have stopped there and redone the experiment with a different method of measurement, seeing as we only took into account those pigeons which landed and took off, but the sheer fun of anti-matter pigeons drew us in and we prepared and placed a sign displaying our fact.
We counted pigeons taking off as -1, which was probably the mistake with counting those that landed, but hey, who cares when it results in negative decimal pigeons?
Part 2: Yarmouth people are fat.
We then moved down to the opposite end of the market to calculate a fat/thin ratio of Sunday walkers. These results may be skewed in favour of thin people, as the fatter Yarmouthian will often remain stationary for an entire Sunday (I know I have done). As with the pigeons we counted for 1 minute intervals 5 times, then averaged it.
Turns out Yarmouth is fat, by an 8:7 ratio. So it's closer than it seems.
And up goes a sign...
To measure fat Vs Thin, Adam suggested the nicely named bulge test. If it's bulging, they're going on the list.
Part 3: Great Yarmouth Market consists of Chip stalls, and little else.
This one had signs fighting against it already, so we decided to make it mathematically proven. After 2 counts of the stalls, we found that that there is definitely more to Yarmouth Market than chips. The ratio ended up 11:16 in favour of 'not-chips'.
Yeah, so it's not public behaviour, gonna make somethin' of it punk?
Part 4: The majority of Yarmouthians are old people.
For this experiment we moved onto regent road, taking root on a bench and marking some boundaries for where people had to walk through to be counted we began counting. After several separate minutes counting we averaged the numbers, and it came up in favour of....
Old people! Yarmouth is an old persons home of a town!
Not by far though.
So there you have it, Yarmouth may be fat and old, but it has anti-pigeons, and stalls other than chip ones!
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Hee! You left the last one outside bingo! Excellent.
What!
Your pigeon methodology is horrible! That won't prove anything about anything! If you count pigeons taking off as -1 and pigeons landing as 1, then unless all of the pigeons land in Yarmouth and then walk out of town too take off, you'll inevitably get 0. Greater Yarmouth could have a thousand times more pigeons than anywhere else in the world and you'll still get 0!
That's horrible research design! It doesn't tell you anything about how many pigeons you've got!!
-JJason (Who apparently has strong emotions about research design than he previously realized)
He is kind of right about the pigeon methodology, guys...
=\
Yeah, it is... The desire to talk about anti-pigeons was far too great!
We have both done GCSE maths so we knew that was the stupidest way to do it but I kind of wanted to score one for Humanities! by proving the futility of maths and the fact that you can prove anything you want if you have enough numbers. Including anti-pigeons.
Edit: changed the wording, read it back and I sounded jolly agressive. I'm always doing this.
I believe that this particular completion, above all other GY0 completions, has inspired a desire to visit Great Yarmouth (I should add that GY is mentioned in Lynn Truss' Eats, Shoots & Leaves).
I recently proposed an intensive course of ESL instruction based on the book and thusly my administrators are hiding my copy of the book in their desks while they pretend to consider my proposal. It is mentioned because of the following: Hot Dogs a Meal in its’ Self (sign in Great Yarmouth)
Linky link - I can't name the original chapter but any and all should read the book anyway;)
Eats, Shoots, & Leaves is an excellent book. Which bears little upon the general brilliance of anti-matter pigeons.
"LOOK, IT'S BISCUITS! LOOK AT ALL THE BISCUITY GOODNESS!" gloriousness is a photo description