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It sure makes me think how important it is to go through stats with a fine toothcomb. Sneaky anomalies are waiting around every corner. :)

Been looking at this again, just to make sure I'd done everything right, and I can see a few places for improvement. Number one, I've figured a much better way of calculating the lunar cycle, including one way which factors in for 'Day 29', which only 'appears' half the time. Mainly, though...

According to this conspiracy theory website, there are five archived speeches where President Bush mentioned "new world order": What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal...

Nice post, Jez, and welcome to the forum. :) That's true. The size of the moon's gravitational pull on earth will be as a result of distance, which changes by around 17,000 miles either side of an average of 238,000 miles. Relative position and distance to the sun are also a factor. The tidal...

It makes sense if you only have a small data set, as some entries may correspond with a higher number of 'outliers' than others, and that would throw it off. But on something this massive it doesn't make any significant difference.

I guess mostly because their results don't agree with reality, and then partly because their results didn't agree with other large scale studies, including bigger ones. Also it wasn't really presented in a very convincing way, and they expressed doubts themselves about whether they'd calculated...

I might be misunderstanding your question, but are you thinking that because there are no Tuesdays in the data - forgetting holidays and weekends for the time being - that there should be one (or more) less days in the left-hand column? If so, the answer is because over the course of 21 years...

Good questions. :) 1. Because the lunar cycle is a cycle, the chart is slightly repeated, to better represent it (I should probably mention that) 2. What's been removed are Tuesdays, weekends, and holidays. The way this works is: let's say there are 7670 data points - i.e., individual day...

Often described as an old wives' tale, the idea of a connection between the phase of the moon and an increase in birth rates still persists today, including among those who work in childbirth, as exemplified in this article at The Huffington Post: An incredible 45 babies entered the world last...

I've got a few jokes I could make here, but I'll just be sensible instead. ;) Less hospital staff working, and less c-sections scheduled (in UK and US that accounts for ~25 and ~35% of births respectively) - same reason why weekends are always lower. I made a chart of US births similar to the...

Hm. Even though it looks authentic I have my doubts about that one. Did Mark Twain ever refer to himself in the third person? I'll have to go do some checking. This one's definitely genuine though:

That's what they put forward. But there's no correlation from the data I've checked. Not sure where they went wrong.

Checking in on that, I found that by far the largest study done did claim to show a link - a 1998 paper produced by an astrophysicist team at Appalachian State University, looking at data for over forty million live births, and published in I.A.P.P.P. Communications (NASA/Harvard affiliated?)...

The number of misattributed quotes of 'his' I come across, I'm beginning to wonder if he ever said anything.

Yep. As mentioned above, with reference to mammals that menstruate in similar ways to humans. This list, however, is of mammals' estrous cycles, which is something different. Which "similarities in the data" do you mean? Apart from when sample sizes are too small, there don't seem to be any...

It's more likely the same reasons in the Southern Hemisphere as it is in the Northern - Australia's three most popular birth months are September, March, and February. So Christmas holidays followed by winter snuggles. In the north we get the double whammy of Christmas and winter combined...

Naw, October babies are conceived in January/February. Christmas holidays are the reason most babies (in Christmas-celebrating countries) are born in September - even in Australia. :)

Some golden footage in that video: 4:00 for Knodel's adventures with gyroscopes, and 9:10 for the priceless moment when Jeran's predictions come true - just not in the way that he wanted. :D

It's interesting that a PhD such as Cutler, who does apply statistical analysis to her data, could get it so wrong. In her 1987 paper she states: A random distribution [of cycle dates] would yield a flat density since it would be equally likely for women to begin to menstruate on any day of the...

Both Cutler's four studies (when combined) and Law's study use over 800 volunteers to gather data. That might seem like a lot but, as an example of why a sample size of even several hundred is an insufficient number on which to base a conclusion, I just looked at which month my facebook friends'...