Hippo Attacks
Hippo Attacks
[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk. He has lifted both arms with palm up towards the screen of his laptop in front of him. Megan stands behind him to the right, looking over his shoulder at the screen.] Cueball: I hate unsourced statistics. Cueball: This viral post says hippos kill 2,900 people a year, but this random listicle says 500. Megan: Makes sense. Megan: Publishing the real number would be a HIPPO violation.

The first part of this comic deals with unreliable sources on the internet. Neither "viral posts" nor "random listicles " are usually very reliable sources of information. They rarely cite their sources, [ citation needed ] and they are often published without much fact-checking, as published volume and impressive-sounding numbers are far more important for ad-revenue than actual facts.
The viral post appears to be this Facebook post. The relevant source is unknown (and may very well be made up, since the source is ClickHole, a satirical website formerly owned by The Onion ). There are a number of listicles Cueball may be referring to, but they all appear to be citing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , however, even they do not seem to provide source for the number of fatalities caused by hippopotamus.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ( HIPAA , pronounced HIP-uh ) is an American healthcare law enacted in 1996. One of the most commonly cited provisions from HIPAA is the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which regulates the use and disclosure of protected health information.
In this comic, Cueball and Megan are discussing the number of hippopotamus attacks, which is unverified. Megan proposes an alternative explanation as to why this particular number is hard to come by: it would be violating the patients' privacy to create statistics of a very specific and unusual cause of death. The punchline comes with the pun on "hippo violation" ("HIPAA violation").
The title text amplifies the criticism of listicles. They sometimes provide factoids with regards to ill-defined, hard-to-measure numbers, and these factoids might end up in common circulation between such articles. One extreme example would be the number of waves in the ocean. Some problems with this definition would be:
With different replies to these questions, wildly different answers could be reached. But, counting every body of water on the planet, 850 trillion waves works out as around 2.354 (unique) waves per square meter.
[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk. He has lifted both arms with palm up towards the screen of his laptop in front of him. Megan stands behind him to the right, looking over his shoulder at the screen.] Cueball: I hate unsourced statistics. Cueball: This viral post says hippos kill 2,900 people a year, but this random listicle says 500. Megan: Makes sense. Megan: Publishing the real number would be a HIPPO violation.
