Dumb Professor

Evidently, the bar to become a University of Chicago Chair has been lowered overly much. Get a load of this "statistician" and his methodology:

• The crowd for Friday's Stanley Cup parade and rally was huge by any measure, but at least one statistician says the city's official estimate of two million attendees is a bit overzealous.

  "Most censuses of Chicago give you three million people for Chicago," said Stephen Stiegler, the Chairman of the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. "Do you really believe that two-thirds of Chicago was down there? No!"

Never mind that Metra was running full cars to and from the end of their numerous rail lines. And for the first time in recent memory, lakefront parking garages were full to overflowing. No, all 2 million people came from the population of Chicago, IL.

We have our own doubts about the 2 million number being thrown around, but we base it on knowledge of faulty crowd estimates, the tendency for politicians and Department brass to lie through their teeth, and the experience we've had working events where a million people actually show up. We don't just assume two-thirds of Chicagoans took off work, skipped school and showed up downtown.

And admit it - neither did any of you, which makes every one of us at least as smart as someone running a department of a university ranked among the tops in Nobel Prize winners.