25.05.06: Bizarre statistic...:Ron, IU

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Thought I'd share this bizarre statistic with you (no idea why!)

I was doing some general research into the membership of IU, particularly the average number of band members, ratio of locations, that sort of nonsens (as if I had nothing better to do, right?) and I wrote the SQL query

SELECT avg( membership ) FROM `iu3_artists` WHERE membership <> ''

to calculate the average number of members per Act, where the Act in question had editted their entry and had provided that information.

When the query returned the answer, I figured I must have written the query wrong, so I tried again, and got the same result. Then I got the calculator out and double checked. The answer (for the 58 Acts who have supplied such data) is, bizarrely, 'Pi'.

Yep, remember Pi from Mathematics? Pi is 22 divided by 7, which is 3.142857 with the '142857' after the decimal point repeated to infinity. The SQL query I wrote returned the answer 3.142857142857 so the average number of Members in IU Artists, for which data is available, is Pi.

How likely is that to happen again? And who cares...?

I've uploaded a screenshot in case anyone gives a monkey's and wants to check! Click the thumbnail below, or right-click it and select "Save As.."



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