There is a great quote about Usenet by Gene Spafford that I'm going to borrow and use to describe computers:

<blockquote>
The computing power you have in front of you is like a herd of performing circus elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to direct, awe-inspiring, entertaining, but also capable of producing mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
</blockquote>

<p>
Computers nowadays are really good at whipping through billions of calculations on billions of pieces of data. The Problem is that you aren't so good at dealing with the output (even if you developed your math ability to the level of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan">Ramanujan</a> [<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi">Example re: Pi</a> search for Ramanujan] and even then your computer can still <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_mathematics">blow you away</a>).
</p>

<p>
One of the ways to prevent the issuance of massive amounts of p00 is convert it into human-usable data using statistics. With a firm grounding in statistics and freely available stats packages (like <a href="http://www.r-project.org">R</a>) you can make data you have usable (ever wonder what IMDb rankings mean? Tom Moertel <a href="http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/01/17/mining-gold-from-the-internet-movie-database-part-1">did</a>).
</p>

<p>
And that's just one example; Stats is a great way to turn the world of p00 around you into something you can actually use.
</p>