Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’
Interpretation
Correlation can be misleading without establishing a causal relationship.
This quote humorously highlights the common misunderstanding that just because two events occur together, one must cause the other. It suggests that while correlations can be intriguing, they should be approached with skepticism, as they may lead us to make incorrect assumptions about causality.
In practice
In a scientific discussion about data analysis, one might say this quote to caution against jumping to conclusions based solely on correlation.
I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals - or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it's not all that interesting.
One of the nice things about the Internet is you can do a comic that's just for Ph.D. students, or for truck drivers, and you get to reach all of them without having to satisfy the other 99%.
A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.
News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.
Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.
I did not come to NASA to make history.
A strong feeling of adventure is animating those who are working on bacterial viruses, a feeling that they have a small part in the great drive towards a fundamental problem in biology.
We have to understand the ubiquity of energy in everything we do. Energy is core to our economy and it brings with it environmental challenges, and it's core to our security challenges.
If we just stay at the crest of the mycelial wave, it will take us into heretofore unknown territories that will be just magnificent in their implications.
Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
Farming is the riskiest profession in the world since the fate of the crop is closely linked to the behaviour of the monsoon.
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