Let me explain, officer

I am not in the habit of using a camera in public bathrooms, but since I haven’t written any post in the CrazyStats category for a while I figured this was worth taking the risk of being arrested.  Last weekend, I had the honor of using a urinal which “saves 88% more water than a one gallon urinal”. A completely meaningless statement that masquerades as a statistic (presumably they mean “uses 88% less water”). How much water does a one gallon urinal save? I know how much it consumes (one gallon) but how do you define how much it saves? Compared to what? To a standard one gallon model? Well, a one gallon doesn’t save anything compared to a one gallon, so the urinal I used (if it uses less than one gallon) actually saves infinitely more water than a one gallon urinal. If you are going to make meaningless claims, why stop at 88%?

Marketing claims based on meaningless statistics. It’s not just for Cloud Computing.

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