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I guess we need to pull the couch jokes out of storage.

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You mean the other jokes I've polled? I tag them with #statsjokepoll, or just check my posts since that's been most of my content the last couple of months.

AI makes mistakes. It's baked into how it works - that's the cost of the wider scope of its domain. Until now, the whole point to computers is that they don't make mistakes. I think we are struggling to adjust to this.

Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

What is the difference between a duck? One of its legs is both the same. #statsjokepoll Wow, I thought we'd hit bottom with "Why did the chicken cross the road?" This one actually made people angry. I've always appreciated that this joke makes no sense but insists on having a punchline anyway.

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How much do rainbows weigh? Not much. They're pretty light. #statsjokepoll I've always liked this joke. It was unexpectedly polarizing. That was also a rainbow joke.

Bar chart: 5: 12%, 4: 26%, 3: 21%, 2: 14%, 1: 28%.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

What's brown and sticky? A stick. #statsjokepoll This joke was fairly new to me but apparently it's old and tired and it flopped. We're at the point in class now that we can talk about these as probability distributions. Really looking forward to hypothesis testing.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I never noticed until just now that it actually says “best bathroom reading ever” right there on the cover.

Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Very old book. There may be more up to date options. It’s great fun - not just for the train wrecks, but to see how some entertainment careers may have gone very differently.

Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I agree and it held that role for me for a very long time. However, a book of unsold TV pilots did indeed come close. Collections of Roger Ebert's most blistering movie reviews also did well.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I like your spirit. We'll put an algebra on jokes whether there should be one or not!

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

#statsjokepoll What's the difference between a well dressed man on a unicycle and a poorly dressed man on a bike? Attire! This is a new behavior. Huge spike at 4, low sd at 1.04. This seems to be an objectively above average joke.

histogram of ratings 1-5 with spike at 4: 5%, 14%, 23%,45%,13%

Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I did the Monty Hall problem in class today and I named the goat behind the door Prepotente. No one got it. If kids aren't reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, what are they reading? NM, I know the answer.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It's only nominally categorical, but returns diminish rapidly on taking how you measure uniformity too seriously here. One approach may be to find some uniformly distributed feature of the population and construct a joke that hits different realizations of that feature differently.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Loosely uniform. What kind of joke would get ratings of 1-5 in roughly equal proportions? More formally, the histogram has high correlation with a horizontal regression line.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Recurring theme in stats is that our probabilistic intuition sucks. I love the birthday problem - estimate the probability that 2 people in the room of about 55 have the same birthday. 83% guessed <50%, a majority <20%. Actual answer: 98%. (Match found on checking 5 students) #teachmath

Poll: how likely is it that 2 people in the room have the same bday? Almost certain 4%, Very likely 2%, Likely 10%, About even 0%, Unlikely 20%, Very unlikely 53% (!), Almost certainly not 10%.

Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I give my stats class a daily joke to rate from 1 to 5 and post the results #statsjokepoll. The idea is to generate data sets to analyze, and to break up the class a bit. But this has me thinking about the nature of humor, e.g. what kind of joke would give a uniform distribution? #mathchat

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros? Elephino! I got that one from the Muppets. Highest mean yet (3.73). #statsjokepoll

bar graph of joke results, left-skewed with high mean of 3.73

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Reposted by Bill Wood

HexSumGame.com @mathmisery.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

ok, got some coloring in and i think these are the best ones yet. different hyperbolic tilings seem to work better / worse with different color schemes. -- #mathart #mathsky #gamedev

math art on hyperbolic geometry of a solve HexSum board

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

To be fair, he also has clone wars experience.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

What did the snail say while riding on the turtle's back? Whee! Suggested by @mathartforall.bsky.social. Maybe I told it wrong.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The verb is “equals” or “is” and x+y is the subject. And this is an excellent question. I try to demystify notation by emphasizing that equations are just shorthand for full sentences.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Interesting class discussion from a #statsjokepoll using the World's Funniest Joke. The poll matched the project's result with the highest mean so far but more from nobody hating it than everyone loving it. This is really the World's Least Unfunny Joke, which isn't the same thing. Joke in alt text

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says, "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence; then a gun shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, "OK, now what?

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I realized in last week's #statjokespoll that I can summon different kinds of distributions with different kinds of jokes. What kind of joke will get a uniform distribution?

Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I asked my German friend if he knew how many innings were in a baseball game. He said, "No." The most successful #statsjokepoll yet, which is reassuring because I love this joke. Distribution was what I was rooting for -- generally liked, but some people just didn't get it.

Frequency chart of joke scores, spikes at 1,4,5.

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I may try a good joke on Thursday. It will probably bomb.

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I'm deliberately keeping these non-mathy. They get enough stupid math puns from me in class, and this is supposed to be a little mental math break anyway.

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What has five toes and isn't my foot? Your foot. #statsjokepoll We calculated the mean and median in class. I don't think I'll tell my 12-year-old, who insisted I use this joke.

Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

#statsjokepoll from last week: What is orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot. It did alright.

bar chart of joke responses, symmetric with median at 3/5

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This is why baseball is the only sport I ever followed. There’s just so much data from over a century of organized play records across 162 (now) regular games each year. There’s just so much ridiculous analysis to do! The math is why people enjoy sports, right?

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Today's #statsjokepoll: Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side! I thought this would be a good base line joke and I wanted a different data set so we could play with 5-number summaries. Always great when you tell a joke and no one is aware that a joke happened.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side! Bar chart showing students did not like this joke.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

This feels appropriate in more than one way.

Bill Cosby with his pen from "Picture Pages."

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

First #statsjokepoll: How does NASA organize a party? They planet. Good start with what the class consensus agrees is a solidly mediocre joke.

Bar chart of joke results, rating 1 to 5, spike at 3

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I'm going to start every statistics class with a joke. I will then poll the class and have them rate the joke from 1 to 5. This will give us some data early to play with bar charts and such, but by the end of the term we'll have enough to do confidence intervals. I need jokes.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

And apologies in advance to my students this semester as my Rocketbook notes inevitably start looking like this.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

That headline badly needed a hyphen.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Among my problems with AI is that I like the em dash.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

My career basically tracked the decline in real time. I got my tenure track job right when the bubble burst, tenured when the state started actively prescribing how we operate, full professor as the liberal arts mission is effectively retired.

Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

My university has all kinds of metrics for for assessing what we are doing. Not one of them concerns whether anybody is learning anything.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

I assign this in an online class I just started and I make the point (no pun) very explicit about why women are depicted this way.

Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

My 6th-grader got up this morning and asked me for some data so they could make box plots and histograms. Happily, I was ready to go because I've been doing exactly this all week preparing an online solution guide for my college statistics class. This is awesome in some ways, troubling in others.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Quick, cheap math! You can get the Squigonometry ebook today at half price! Just in time for easter, you can have your very own superegg hunt! link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

link.springer.com

Squigonometry: The Study of Imperfect Circles

This textbook offers an accessible, modern introduction to generalized trigonometric functions. Discover squigonometry: the study of imperfect circles.