“If values are fairly evenly distributed around an average, then roughly two-thirds of all outcomes will be one standard deviation other side of the average.”

— Steve Keen

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 10, The Price Is Not Right, p. 235

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Steve Keen27

Australian economist 1953

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter II, Elements Of Combinatorial Analysis, p. 32.

“Matter is actually distributed very unevenly… conglomerated into stars and galactic systems. The average density is the density that we should get if all… could be evaporated into atoms of hydrogen, or protons, and… distributed evenly over the whole of space. …three or four protons in every cubic foot. …a million million times less than that of the most perfect vacuum that we can produce… The universe thus consists mostly of emptiness… consider a universe without any matter at all, an empty universe, as a good approximation. But we may also take as our first approximation a universe containing… three or four protons per cubic foot. The local deviations from the average, caused by the conglomeration of matter into stars and stellar systems, are then disregarded in the grand scale model, and are only taken into account when we come to study details.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

“Beware of averages. The average person has one breast and one testicle.”

Dixy Lee Ray (1914–1994) Seventh governor of Washington

October 1991, quoted in the Tri-City Herald, published in Kennewick, Washington. <br class="br">Former Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, speaking at a Forward Washington conference in Pasco, warned her audience against misuse of statistics. The Tri-City Herald quoted the always quotable Ray as saying: 'Beware of averages. The average person has one breast and one testicle.' — Jean Godden, " How Many Lawyers Do You Need To Fry Spam? http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19911009&slug=1309893", October 9, 1991, Seattle Times. Accessed 29 August 2012.

““One of the laws of nature,” Gordon said, “is that half the people have got to be below average.”
”For a Gaussian distribution, yeah,” Cooper said. “Sad, though.””

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 17 (p. 234)

“The average man is happier in the wrong with a crowd, than he is in the right with only one or two companions.”

Chapman Cohen (1868–1954) British atheist and secularist writer and lecturer

[God and the Universe: Eddington, Jeans, Huxley, & Einstein, 128, 1931, Pioneer Press, https://books.google.com/books?id=QmBHAAAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=happier]

“The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

He is reported to have first said this in an interview on Fresh Air, NPR (31 August 1993) { unverified http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1107153}, he repeated it, prefacing it with "As I've said many times…" in "The Science in Science Fiction" on Talk of the Nation, NPR (30 November 1999, Timecode 11:55) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1067220. See also The future has arrived... - Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/.

“In the beginning of 1917, two solutions of the field equations for a homogeneous isotropic universe had been found, which I… call the solutions "A" and "B."… at that time only static solutions were looked for. It was thought that the universe must be a stable structure… In one of these solutions (B) the average density was zero, it was empty; the other one (A) had a finite density…. In B, to get the real universe, we should have to put in a few galactic systems, in A we should have to condense the evenly distributed matter into galactic systems. The universe A… has an average density, but no expansion. It is therefore called the static universe. B, on the other hand… expands, and it could only parade in the garb of a static universe because there is nothing in it to show the expansion. B is therefore called the empty universe. Thus we had two approximations : the static universe with matter and without expansion, and the empty one without matter and with expansion. The actual universe… has both matter and expansion… In 1917… the actual value of the density was still entirely unknown, and the expansion had not yet been discovered.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->