Twitter puns
Posted by Tom Moertel Thu, 07 May 2009 17:55:00 GMT
I confess: I like puns. So I was delighted to discover that Twitter’s 140-character limit offers an interesting new opportunity for pun writers: the abbreviation pun. A recent attempt:
Chairs kill? Bad news for coders. “These data demonstrate a dose-response ass’n between sitting time and mortality.” http://bit.ly/19RR6R
(Does tweeting stuff like that make me a reprobate?)
readers
Beyond the great pun, the news is even worse when you correctly analyze the probabilities.
One can either die or remain alive; one can either stand or remain non-standing. Because we have two events to consider, we can use Bayes’ theorem:
P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B)
In other words, the probability of dying given that one remains seated equals the probability of remaining seated given that one is dead, times the a priori probability of being dead, divided by the a priori probability of remaining seated.
Now the probability of remaining seated after death is astonishingly high (call it 99%); the percentage of all humans that are currently alive is only something like 6%, according to a recent Scientific American article, so 94% of humans are currently dead; and looking around the office, I’d say the average human remains on his posterior well over half the day.
So by my calculations, we have roughly a 186% chance of being utterly screwed.
Tim, thank you for your insightful analysis of the likelihood of one’s being dead, given that one is seated. You have – and I’m certain the good Reverend Bayes would agree with me on this – done an admirable job of calculating the relevant posterior probability.
(Somebody – please! – stop me.)
here’s a twitter page that does a pun every weekday: http://twitter.com/x2Centsx
I write one pun a day on twitter!!
http://twitter.com/gabriellaheidi