It has been said that figures don’t lie but liars figure. In his book Fads and Fallacies (1) Martin Gardner presented this cautionary tale as part of his examination of the numerical myths associated with the Great Pyramid in Egypt. … If one looks up the facts about the Washington Monument in the World Almanac, he will find considerable fiveness. Its height is 555 feet and 5 inches. The base is 55 feet square, and the windows are set at 500 feet from the base. If the base is multiplied by 60 (or five times the number of months in a year) it gives 3,300, which is the exact weight of the capstone in pounds. Also, the word "Washington" has exactly ten letters (two times five). And if the weight of the capstone is multiplied by the base, the result is 181,500 —a fairly close approximation of the speed of light in miles per second. If the base is measured with a "Monument foot",(2) which is slightly smaller than the standard foot, its side comes to 56½ feet. This times 33,000 yields a figure even closer to the speed of light.
And is it not significant that the Monument is in the form of an obelisk—an ancient Egyptian structure? Or that a picture of the Great Pyramid appears on a dollar bill, on the side opposite Washington's portrait? Moreover, the decision to print the Pyramid (i.e., the reverse side of the United States seal) on dollar bills was announced by the Secretary of the Treasury on June 15, 1935—both date and year being multiples of five. And are there not exactly twenty-five letters (five times five) in the title, "The Secretary of the Treasury"?
It should take an average mathematician about fifty-five minutes to discover the above "truths," working only with the meager figures provided by the Almanac.
One definition of the quality of data is its “fitness for use”, which implies that the use has been defined. There is increasing interest at the FDA and within many companies in establishing data warehouses that will allow for meta-analyses that are orders of magnitude bigger than any possible today. We must be careful that, in our haste to mine the data for interesting relationships we do not use the data in ways that were never intended and create our own mythologies.
(1) Martin Gardner, Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science. Dover Publications, New York.
c. 1957. pg 179.
(2) Derived by dividing the length of one building stone by 25, i.e., five times five.
