Vivian Lew

the vanishing girl

Lecturer
UCLA Department of Statistics
8125 Math Sciences Building Box 951554
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554
e-mail:vlew@stat.ucla.edu

Currently

Statistics 130 & Statistics 140

Useful Pages

(with a Demographic/Geographic emphasis)

·         Demography Page and the Office of Population Research

·         CIESIN's U.S. Demography Home Page and the California Demographic Research Unit

·         SAS Institute,

·         Stata

Other Sites

·         Superpages

·         Software Central at UCLA

I am amused by Pascal's Wager. The short version:

“If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him,
while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.”

(The longer, academic statement of Pascal's wager can be found here)

Also amusing is the bumper sticker version:

If you live as if there is no God,
MAKE SURE YOU'RE RIGHT

For the statistician in you, carefully consider the expected value.
This was taken from:

Hájek, Alan, "Pascal's Wager", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2004/entries/pascal-wager/>.
UCLA Department of Statistics
Last updated: 09-Nov-2010
Access count is: 11088, since 24-Feb-2005
Maintained by: Vivian Lew [vlew@stat.ucla.edu]