Solving problems – analyzing some interesting datasets

What is the correlation coefficient between per-capita cheese consumption and death code W75 (accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed) for the years 2000 to 2009?

Recall that the cheese data came from http://www.ers.usda.gov/datafiles/Dairy_Data/chezcon_1_.xls.

This is a pesky bit of data because it's in a proprietary spreadsheet format. As much as we dislike copying and pasting, there's no other easy way to get this data.

The strangulation in bed data comes from cause of death W75 grouped by year. The data request process starts at http://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D76. There will be some further espionage work required to enter a request for data. For some additional help, check http://wonder.cdc.gov/wonder/help/ucd.html.

How the correlation possibly be so high?

What is it about cheese consumption and death by strangulation in bed that leads to this amazing correlation?

Getting some more data

HQ appears to be working on...