Tukey's birthday
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Mouseover title: "Numbers can be tricky. On the day of my 110th birthday, I'll be one day younger than John Tukey was on his."
The difference in day counts is explained by explain xkcd:
The title text states that Randall would be one day younger than Tukey would be on his 110th birthday. Tukey's 110th birthday (on Monday) marked 40,178 days since his birth. Randall's 110th birthday (2094-10-17) will occur 40,177 days after his birth, due to having only passed through 27 leap-days (the first in 1988, the last in 2092) instead of Tukey's 28 instances (from 1916 to 2024, inclusive).
An open-access version of Tukey's cited work can be found here. A bit more of the quote's context, from that source:
11. Facing uncertainty. The most important maxim for data analysis to heed, and one which many statisticians seem to have shunned, is this: "Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise." Data analysis must progress by approximate answers, at best, since its knowledge of what the problem really is will at best be approximate. It would be a mistake not to face up to this fact, for by denying it, we would deny ourselves the use of a great body of approximate knowledge, as well as failing to maintain alertness to the possible importance in each particular instance of particular ways in which our knowledge is incomplete.
For a slightly different take on the same issue, see our post on last week's xkcd.
Wikipedia's article on John Tukey is worth a read. There are also many past LLOG posts referencing Tukey, whether centrally or in the background — and several of them also start from an xkcd strip. A sample:
"Complexity", 9/7/2005
"The Long Tail: In which Gauss is not mocked, but twits (and dictionaries) are", 12/2/2005
"Statistically Significant Other", 2/4/2009
"Data journalism and film dialogue", 4/10/2016
"Becoming a modifier", 7/8/2017
"One law to rule them all?", 6/2/2019
"The statistical meat axe", 10/29/2020
"The evolving PubMed landscape", 7/9/2024
"Kinds of science", 8/28/2024
Ron Irving said,
June 19, 2025 @ 10:25 am
As a February 29 baby, I realized right away what the explanation for the mouseover title was.