pretty scary stuff if your sexual preference is other than heterosexual--until one looks at how the data was compiled according to the web site it was based on " , obituaries from homosexual journalscompared to obituaries from mainstream newspapers this method produces sample that could be non-representative of either the homosexual or non-homosexual population (or bothfor large number of reasons for exampleit seems to infer that someone is gay or lesbian if and only if their obituary appears in "homosexual journal,and that someone is not gay if their obituary appears in "mainstream newspaper it also seems to assume that the deaths for which obituaries appear are representative of all deaths how does one go about evaluating such sampleone technique is to compare data compiled from the sample against data compiled elsewhere for exampleone could compare the ratio of gay men to straight men in the obituary study to other studies reporting the relative sizes of those two populations context matters it is easy to read more into the data than it actually impliesespecially when viewing the data out of context on april cnn reported that"mexican health officials suspect that the swine flu outbreak has caused more than deaths and roughly , illnesses pretty scary stuff--until one compares it to the , deaths attributable annually to the seasonal flu in the an often quotedand accuratestatistic is that most auto accidents happen within miles of home so what--most driving is done within miles of home and besideswhat does "homemean in this contextthe statistic is computed using the address at which the automobile is registered as "home might one reduce the probability of getting into an accident by merely registering one' car in some distant placeopponents of government initiatives to reduce the prevalence of guns in the are fond of quoting the statistic that roughly of the firearms in the will not be used to commit violent crime in any given year does this mean that there is not much gun violence in the sthe national rifle association reports that that there are roughly million privately owned firearms in the -- of million is , beware of extrapolation it is all too easy to extrapolate from data we did that in when we extended fits derived from linear regression beyond the data upon which the regression was done extrapolation should be done only when one has sound theoretical justification for doing so one should be especially wary of straightline extrapolations