!VAR HAGENDOORN

The Joy of Stats

The Joy of Stats is an excellent BBC documentary presented by Hans Rosling about the wonderful world of statistics. Did you know that the average person has 1.999 legs? There are some people with one leg or no legs, but nobody has three or more legs. The average only tells you so much.

Statistics was once considered dull, but amidst today's data deluge statistics and data visualization have become essential tools for understanding the world. I look forward to the day when Bayesian statistics will be taught at primary schools.

Update: For a couple of days the full video was available on YouTube, after which it was removed following a copyright claim by the production company, Wingspan Productions.

Links

You can still watch it at Gapminder, the foundation established by Hans Rosling.

You can also watch it divided into episodes at the Open University.