The featured image of this post will probably come as quite shocking to most readers. Inform yourself at your own risk. If any Nicholas Cage films are set to come out in the near future be aware of any and all swimming pools. Hide your kids, hide your wife, cuz they drownin everybody up in here. Well, not quite. This graph came from a website titled “spurious correlations”. This website correlates data such as the data presented at the post title. While these data sets may appear to correlate there is no doubt they do not have a relationship.

For section, Ancy asked us to come up with some of our own spurious correlations. We were assigned groups and given the task of creating a “badhoc” presentation about this correlation. The inspiration for this assignment stemmed from an event called “BAHfest”. This event features many presentations that correlate and make conclusions about seemingly ridiculous hypotheses. One of the presentations from BAHFest concluded that cats randomly sprint out of a room for no apparent reason at all in an attempt to limit their own life span for population control. Many of these presentations are absolutely hilarious.

Naturally I was enthralled to discover I would be participating in a BAHFest style presentation. I formed a group with two other brilliant individuals and together we embarked on a journey to find spurious correlations. We decided that our presentation explore the science of forgetting. Why do people forget? Through mathematics and computational practices we came to the utterly infallible conclusion that people forget because it decreases their stress levels ultimately leading to a longer life span.

This correlation may not seem far fetched, but listen to this. We also discovered that individuals who drink more milk tend to be less stressed because of a hormone in milk. So, people that drink milk are more likely to forget things and be less stressed. These people would normally go on to live longer lives due to decreased  stress levels, however, the milk fat brings on heart conditions that negate the extension of their life.

Whats the point? Why did Ancy ask us to complete such ludicrous presentations? For one, it was practice for the Ignite presentations that we were later required to complete. Secondly, it was a lesson in how a medium can manipulate a message. The messages conveyed in this assignment were invalid, however, the format in which they were presented brought to them a sense of credibility. The medium is the message, choose wisely.