Maths?

Invented by a mathematician to give them something to do!

God then invented statisticians so that mathematicians had someone to argue with.

One average people have less than 2 legs.
I get the feeling that maths is considered a joke, must get some data on that

The problem is that people (especially politicians and pressure groups) are very fond of misusing mathematics and statistics in an attempt to either prove a point or retrospectively justify an unjustifiable action.

The infamous rubbish "hockey stick" curve that the imbeciles in DECC presented to the Select Committee being a good example (and I still think that PS should have been disciplined for misleading parliament like that).

Another problem is that too often numbers, particularly large numbers, are given without context. If people understood the need to remember a few rough numbers (e.g., population of the country, power use, years since the last ice age, whatever is relevant...) they'd have a much better chance of hanging those numbers on sensible hooks and not getting bamboozled.

E.g., the other day I got a Guardian article corrected: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jan/26/newt-gingrich-moon-base-dream when it said NASA's spending in the 1960s was 3.45% of GDP. I just knew that couldn't be right as NASA spending is a pretty small fraction of US military spending so they'd have been spending a huge percentage of GDP on the military. A quick look showed that actually it was 3.45% of Federal spending which is, in turn, about 1/5th of GDP. Clearly the original journalist and any fact checkers who looked over the article didn't have the context to spot the error. However, plus points to them for giving the amount as a percentage rather than just quoting so many billions of dollars.