I am amazed we get to post #41 and ~3.5 days since the OP and I still get the honor to be the first to reference the definitive work in this field: xkcd: Citogenesis
Related:
My Dad was a mathematician. He was reading the Washington Post at breakfast, as usual, and found an OpEd piece that was using facts and figures to make it’s point. But, the math was wrong. In fact, the calculations were off by some very large factor (I don’t remember exactly, but something like the guy had multiplied instead of divided at one point). My Dad wrote to the author, and he responded to the effect of: Thanks for the correction, but my point stands regardless of any math error, so I’m not going submit a correction.
One science class I did just didn’t do make up labs. But there was one thing you could do: if you came in and got an A on the final, you would get an A in the class, no matter what. So that’s why I did, rather than having to go to school for a single class on lab days.
Mine worked the other way 'round: the exam was on safety and it wasn’t part of the grade, it allowed you entrance to the lab. But except for Electronics (where you still had to pass the safety test before being allowed to touch a soldering gun), the lab wasn’t part of the class - it was the class. We got graded on behavior, correctness of results and on the reports themselves, which had to be written to publication standards.
A sports radio guy gave out the popular, but false, fact that “half of all NFL players die before the age of 55/60” (depending upon where you read this: here is one article saying “20 years less, on average”.)
Problem is, it’s bullshit. I tracked this one down a few years ago to a guy who wrote an article about insurance and made this throw-away comment, without corroboration, because it “seemed right.” When he found out that it was being quoted as a real cite (I believe the “Wall Street Journal” was the culprit) he tried to backtrack it, but it was too late.
The average playing career in the NFL is 2.66 years (cite). Playing is dangerous, but 1 year playing = 6 years decreased life expectancy? Really?
If the life expectancy fact were true, than we should expect about 50% of those who played in the 1986 NFL season to be dead. Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Mike Singletary, John Elway, Boomer Esiason, Dan Marino, Eric Dickerson, Lawrence Taylor, Phil Simms… half of these guys, dead. Who knew?
My institution wasn’t accredited, but didn’t need or seek accreditation because it was self-accreditted.
Actually, it was more complex than that: our engineering course was accredited by the engineering course accreditation people, but our degree wasn’t accredited by the generic degree acreditation people. We weren’t prestigious enough to run or have started an acreditation system for lesser colleges. We pre-dated the big accreditation scheme that accredited all the lesser and greater schools. And it mostly didn’t matter.
It did matter sometimes to post-grad students who were accepted at some poorly-organised foreign college, which then couldn’t find our name on the standard list of school acredited by the group who were responsible for admitting new schools.
A bigger error was made in a 2011 Reinhart-Rogoff study. A magic 90% tipping point on government debt that spells doom. Soon found to be deeply flawed. But their “conclusion” is still widely cited.