NEWS: Being Obese Linked to Voting Republican

Ok, score one funny jab for the liberals. I did chuckle a bit.
Now then, where on the graph should we put the pencil-necked geeks?

I really hate to do this, but I'm going to have to report this article to the FBI under the 1976 Abuse of the Linear Regression Act.

It is sad though that in 20 years data like this will be worthless because 99% of the US will be obese by then.

well yeah, all the smart people will move away. that last 1% will be the pirates.

I know that when Clinton was president, every time he visited a given state, orders for peperoni pizza there would drop by an average of approximately 15%

Fact.

That's my contribution.

If the entire country went for Pirate America would be a much healthier place. Whatever calories there are in casks of rum and raw chicken legs are surely worked off by swashbuckling and ravaging innocent young ladies.

Well, I don't like Bush, but as someone who knows a bit about statistics, I have the duty to point out that an R-square of .1513 is not very good and is probably not statisticallly significant. Oh well.

Though voting for Bush didn't make people fat, nine of the ten fattest states
are red states, according to an obesity study released last week.
The top ten (by percentage of obese adults):
1. Mississippi- 29.5
2. Alabama- 28.9
3. West Virginia- 27.6
4. Louisiana- 27
5. Tennessee- 27.2
6. Texas- 25.8
6. Michigan- 25.4
6. Kentucky- 25.8
9. Indiana- 25.5
10. South Carolina- 25.1

(List and statistics are located in the PDF document mentioned in the article).

because really, who's ever heard of a portly corsair?

[Edited on Aug 29, 2005 11:15PM]

tripod = no loadie

They're just big boned, sheesh.

yes and shed say

Oh honey you better watch some 700 club too!!

lol

If you generated 50 random numbers a million times, the mean R^2 should be zero... but what do you suppose the standard deviation would be? How many sigmas is 15.1 away from zero? Hmm...

I'm starting to understand why the re-do of The Office for American TV was so rubbish...

Bahahahaha. An R^2 value of .15?

That means there is practically no correlation.

No. But that would explain it.

“The r-squared value is .1513, meaning there is a 15.1% correlation…” is the first flaw in this. If r-square is .1513 then the correlation is the square root of .1513 or .39.

What the r-square means is that 15% of the voting behavior of a sate AS A WHOLE can be explained by the percentage of obesity in its population, if there is a casual relationship which cannot be assumed anyway. And since the obese population is from the state as a whole and the voting population is from the subset of people who actually voted, there’s no way to infer characteristics of one from the other. Absolutely nothing can be inferred from this data about individuals.

Maybe all the obese people are democrats but disproportionately ineligible to vote, or too lazy to actually vote. Maybe the Michael Moore sized liberals irk all the skinny republicans so much that they disproportionately turn out to vote out of spite. Or maybe like Al Gore, all the democrats got so upset at losing that they consoled themselves by gorging on junk food. There’s no way to know from this data.

In the end, the country is fat and Bush won. It will likely be even fatter in 2008. If a democrat wins, they’ll be an even higher correlation between the obesity of a state and its voting democrat. Maybe courting the fat vote is the key to victory.

While the statistics here may be shoddy, there is a correlation between obesity and poverty, AND between the impoverished (especially in rural areas) voting Republican.

Fucktheredstates.com might actually be on to something, if only they'd stop being so goddamned snarky just to prove a political point.

well, according to the BMI I'm about a hair away from being obese.
This surprises most people, as I'm fairly trim, have absolutely no bulging fat, and by most appearances am relatively muscular.
I actually was obese (according to my BMI) for a short time, but have since *stopped working out*.

OMG??? WTF You're amused???
how dare you be amused!!!
You have no right to be amused, how could you even think of taking a topic like this and daring to try to gain some amusement out of it *STAMPS FOOT* Young lady, You offend my perceived sense of what been a patriotic american is. For taking the affairs of state in vain I'm going to petition that you be impeached and imprisoned under the patriot act. Who's with me???


Right back at you Thank you, its been quite funny

[Edited on Sep 06, 2005 by chilung]