This statistics cross stitch pattern is now available in my Etsy shop!
The quote for this statistics cross stitch pattern comes from an episode of The Nightly Show on Comedy Central. During one of their #Keepit100 segments, host Larry Wilmore asked the panel (and I’m paraphrasing) if your dog and a stranger were drowning, who would you save, the person or your dog? Rory Albanese replied “If it’s an adult, I save my dog every time because statistically speaking, most people are assholes.” Here’s the clip (you can skip ahead to 1:34):
Keep in mind, I don’t subscribe to this theory most of the time… but there are those moments. As soon as I heard this quote, I scribbled it down and knew I would stitch it someday.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, The Nightly Show is hosted by Larry Wilmore, who did frequent segments on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The show debuted in January 2015 and can be seen just after The Daily Show. Although the show might have started off a little awkwardly, I think Larry and his staff have really hit their stride in recent months. The show packs a lot of laughs, fresh, diverse viewpoints, and some great [bleeped-out] cursing. That Larry is a self-described “blerd” (black nerd) appeals to me as well.
This pattern is packed with mathematical and statistical symbols for various constants and functions. The first “t” is tau, which is a symbol used to represent Kendall’s rank correlation coefficient. The first “a” is alpha, which represents the level of significance, also know as the type I error rate. The second “t” is an addition (plus) sign.
The “S” in “speaking” is an integral sign from calculus, the “E” is a capital sigma that represents a sum, and the symbol for “n” represents an intersection. The “y” and the “G” are both related to Goodman and Kruskal’s gamma. The border pattern is comprised of lower case sigmas which represent the all-important statistic of standard deviation.
It was necessary to take a few liberties with subscripts that complete the pattern and add a little visual interest – but the t sub i very easily could represent interior temperature in engineering applications.
This statistics cross stitch project is perfect for statisticians, scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and smart people. It’s also great for curmudgeons and your favorite anti-social grumps!