Statistics Without Tears: An Introduction for Non-Mathematicians

I am reading this book at the moment. Lest you think I have taken leave of my senses, I should point out that I have to read it. For work. And worse, I am expected not only to understand this book, but actually to use the things I learn from it. In my actual job! MY job. Something has gone very wrong. How did I get here? I don’t know who I am anymore.

Anyway, this book would be brain-melty enough as it is, what with the forcing me to grapple with terms like ‘standard deviation’ and ‘central tendency’, and breezily advising that I should ‘calculate the square root’ of something before proceeding, but without actually telling me what that means or how one goes about doing such a thing.

I typed ‘calculate the square root’ into Google, hoping for a nice friendly little guide, but all I got was lots of ‘how to calculate a square root when you don’t have a calculator’ pages. Sigh. Internet, you don’t understand. I have a calculator. It is right here. Look! Shiny! Please just tell me which buttons to press and in what order I should press them to reveal this mystical square root thing.

Oh, and as for you, book, here come those tears you promised me I wouldn’t have.

Anyway, like I said, brain-melty. Also may cause you to rant at inanimate objects in your head. But then, THEN, the book really starts to mess with you. See, it gives an example of something costing forty pounds, three and a half pence. That’s right, a half pence. A quick flip to the title page tells me that since it was first published in 1981, we can allow the book some leeway here. The halfpenny was still being minted until 1984, and OK, my edition was published in 2005, so you would think some copy editor somewhere along the way would have come along and got rid of the half pence. But, they didn’t. No biggy, right?

But then, a few pages later, there is a chart showing the modes of transport used by students from some fictional college, in the years 2006 – 2010, with the line ‘the proportion of students travelling by car is known for each of the last several years up to 2010.’ What the heck, book? You can predict the future now? And yet you are still using halfpennies? You can predict student car usage up to 2010 but not the devaluation of the pound, huh?

Clearly some copy editor has been meddling with this book. And they have done the editorial equivalent of your Mum buying your school shoes two sizes too big so that there’s ‘room to grow’. And it is bothering me way more than it probably should that this eager beaver editor has gone to such lengths to future-proof this text, all the way up to 2010, whilst at the same time, mere pages earlier, we have a reference to halfpennies! Gah!

And of course, it should be worrying me that of all the information I have been attempting to absorb from the pages of this book, this is what has stuck in my mind. But really, it just proves what I have always known; that my place is with the words, not the numbers.