Truth, lies, and Forty-Two

"An appropriate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem." (J.W. Tukey) And as Douglas Adams observed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "Forty-Two" isn't much of an answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, if one doesn't know what the question actually means. Statistics can obscure rather than illuminate a problem, if we aren't careful.