There was a short tale (or maybe it was and interview, cannot remember) where Isaac Asimov retold where - student in chemistry - was given as homework/laboratory set of experiments and the chore to plot them together with a tendency line.

After n tries (as the data from the experiments were spread semi-randomly) he drew a line roughly in the middle of the diagram and called the whole thing a "shotgun diagram" (or something similar).

When he got back to class, he was surprised by the results of his mates, that more or less led to a neat line.

Then the Professor gave him the maximum vote, as the experiment was intentionally leading to "senseless" results, and he was the only one in the class to have actually honestly reported the results, while all the ohers had evidently faked or invented them.

This is on a similar note:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html