Frankly Unlikely

The Times yesterday reported that 42% of Grandparents never see their grandchildren again after a divorce or separation. But assuming there is no reason why the parents of the parents with custody should be so affected (about 50% of grandparents), that would mean almost every other grandparent lost contact. This seems unlikely.

I hope that the report producers: Families Need Fathers, the Grandparents’ Association and the Family Matters Institute aren’t including dead grandparents in order to create a more exciting number. I think that would be cheating. The Daily Telegraph has the same number but mentions that the sample size is a whopping 211. Were they perhaps recruited from the ranks of Families Need Fathers, the Grandparents’ Association and the Family Matters Institute?

Crapstats Rating: 1. Honesty score: 0

 

Wide eyed and 8 legless

I haven’t commented on the torrent of data pouring onto our screens about the credit crunch because financial journalists do seem more numerically aware than social science commentators. And if I could tell which parts were crap I’d be rich rich rich and my butler woud be writing this.

Meanwhile this blog tries to keep to its purpose of discussing the merits of numerical data. However this is too good to miss – not so much crapstats as mind expanding.
The folowing was given to Blog Junior at school as part of a talk about body image from a recovering atman.

Where to start? The reference is to a paper written in 1971: did they really make sure that the first spider had received a nourishing dish of scrambled flies on toasted flies before they took the photo?

“Speed and Sugar” = “coffee & high sugar cereal”. Dream on.

My spidey sense tells me that self esteem is only a problem for spiders in their alter ego – and Steve Ditko agrees with me.

I remember the grapevine about this study at the time – some say that there was another photo of a spider having a trip. It had spun no web at all! Some said this showed a breakthrough in its consciousness as it stepped out of “the man’s” trap. Others suggested that it had stepped out of the trap game with fatal consequences.

On the other hand its self esteem was rocketing because it had just listened to LA Woman 10 times it a row: “is the record player on, like, you know, repeat, man?”

 

More Large Hadron Collider

Is your blogster alone in thinking that there are some contraditions in the reactions of some scientists to the suggestion that the LHC might create a black hole which will destroy the world.

On the one hand we get a lot of this:
Prof. Jordan Nash: “To create a giant black hole would take a star much bigger than the sun to collapse. We are not doing anything that doesn’t occur in nature every day, and in our own atmosphere.“

and at the same time, we also get a lot of:
scientists want to simulate the conditions of the Big Bang – the point at which our universe was thought to be created
and
“In the $10 billion project — the most extensive physics experiment in history — the Large Hadron Collider will come ever closer to re-enacting the “big bang,” the theory that a colossal explosion created the cosmos.“

Well – which is it?

 

Times sticks tongue in cheek and sucks

Today. the Times published an article on the large Hadron collider which contained a series of such bizarre comprehension-lite comparisons (sadly none with OSSPs) than I can only assume that it was deliberate. So its (ten gallon) hats off to Mark Henderson, Science Editor. Read it here.

Pick of the bunch (but sadly not on the website version):
“140,000 fridges full of sausages could be kept at a temperature colder than outer space by the magnet cooling equipment.”
“2 British Libraries could be filled with the data the LHC will generate every year.”

In the paper there is a really cute little graphic of a London bus to scale against a picture of the ATLAS component, whose purpose is to ’search for extra dimensions, dairk matter and the Higgs boson.”

There’s a great throwaway comment about the extra dimensions: “some theoretical physicists suggest that there could be as many as 26. Most physicists find these every bit as hard to visualise as normal people,” I’d like to meet the others but I’m not sure they could see me.

There’s an unpleasant insight into a physicist who’s really passionate about his work: “That’ll be the first sight of relief, that there are no obstacles in the vacuum chamber,” Dr Evans said. “There could be a Kleenex in the chamber – we’ve had that before. Only when we get the beam around will we be able to tell it’s clear.”

Finally, a bizarre comparison which Matty points out is also a crapstat: “The two streams will collide, at four points, with the energy of two aircraft carriers sailing into each other at 11 knots, inside detectors so vast that one is housed in a cavern that could enclose the nave of Westminster Abbey.” They don’t convert that vastness into Olympic sized swimming pools – but that’s not the main point, its about the energy. Firstly energy is measured in Hiroshimas or Suns, although this may be too little energy for that. Secondly the energy of two aircraft carriers sailing into each other at 11 knots is in fact the same as the energy of two aircraft carriers sailing parallel to each other at 11 knots; and roughly the same as one aircraft carrier sailing alone at 22 knots. Indeed it is roughly comparable to the energy of a London Bus travelling at 147,000 mph.

 

Pot Black

In my physical copy of the Times yesterday, it discussed a recent headline in the Daily Express promising 10 days rainfall in a single day last Friday – and invited readers to submit similar examples of twaddle to
badstats@thetimes.co.uk

Note that there is no reference on the website to this – and my email hasn’t got through to them yet either.
So now you know where to send the stuff when you find it, but my question is haven’t they already got enough themselves?

 

We’re back and it’s still crap

This blog has been lying low, keeping its head above the water but below the parapit – til forced out by today’s issue of the Times. All the usual problems:

1) Lack of sub-editing:
“A £20 pound wind turbine made from reycled materials… can produce enough electricity to run lights for 63 hours or a radio for 30 hours and be built from scrap by unskilled workers in a day.“

2) Lack of maths
News environment (where else?): “The average person throws away four times their own body weight in food each year“.
How much food is thrown away each year in UK: source same same article:
By private households: 6.7 million tonns. All sources: 18.4 million tonnes.
Population of UK (models own estimate): 60 million.
Average weight of average person in UK if the above refers to private households: 28 kilos – less than 4 1/2 stone per person! If it refers to all food waste – then it is hardly thrown away by the average person any more than the average person in the UK has killed 1/250th of an Iraqi since the invasion.

3) Lack of sense:
One of the largest and best preserved Roman villas yet discovered in Britain has been unearthed by archaeologists. Built 1800 years ago on the isle of Wight, the building is as vast as an Olympic swimming pool and shaped like a church.
“But what is wrong with that statement?” asks one of our younger readers. “Simple,” your blogmeister replies, “it should read Olympic sized swimming pool.”

We’ll come back to the question of food thrown away in future postings: does the average person really throw away 100 grapes every year?

 

“Obesity > Climate Change” says Alan Johnson

“Health Secretary Alan Johnson said at the weekend that the obesity epidemic could lead to a public health crisis on the “scale of climate change”.”

What did he mean? where? for whom? How can these things be compared? If the planet literally become too hot for life, or are we talking about the odd outbreak of malaria?
Of one thing however I am sure: its healthier to be overweight than underwater.

 

Shame on you, Rosemary Bennett, Social Affairs Correspondent of the Times

For giving publicity to this heap of crap.
According to research: “Almost three qusrters (70 per cent) of the parents surveyed claimed to make their own pasta sauce; two thirds said they baked their own bread and the same proportion said that they cooked burhers from scratch. More than two thirds baked children’s birthday cakes rather than buying them.”

Come again? More than two thirds. Normally of course its hard to disprove surveys and I’m not complaining about that too much. Its this….

“The research, conducted by Raisingkids, a parenting website, was based on a poll of more than 2500 parents from its website, which external experts say is an accurate reflection of the British family population.”

Now come on – how many parents have ever visited a parenting website and how typical are they of the population? Given that 2/3rds of them bake their own birthday cakes, clearly not many.

Who are these external experts? Well according to the press release on the website: “The sample size was 2687 parents from the Raisingkids.co.uk registered database, which is representative of the UK population as a whole.” This doesn’t mention any external experts at all – so either Rosemary Bennett knows more than we do – or as I suspect – she knows absolutely bugger all about anything.

 

So much crap you could swim in it

You know how, if you run a blog dedicated to the exposure of rubbish figures, you sometimes read something and you think: “That’s got to be wrong – I don’t even have to work it out.” Well here’s one from the Times last week – the news that over 5 milliion old televisions and video playerts would have to be thrown away as a result of the switch to digital broadcasting by 2012 and that

this would fill 80 Olympic-sized swimming pools

What can we do with this? Apart from pointing out that we may well not have built one olympic-sized swimming pool by 2012? Apart from giving the Times an award for Most Innovative Use of the Olympic-Sized Swimming Pool Analogy?

Well obviously if we know the average size of a television or video recorder we could work out the size of an Olympic Swimming Pool.

However there is a problem: while video recorders tend to be cuboid, televisions – particularly older models – tend to be highly irregular in shape – how well tesselated should we assume they will be in these swimming pools? If we get this wrong, for instance by assuming that these televisions are more transformable than is actually the case, we could end up with 80 olympic-sizes swimming pools which were too shallow. They have to have a minimum depth of two metres to meet IOC standards. On the other hand if our OSSPs were of a regulation depth but we were having problems fitting the televisions in, we could probably smash the screens and then fit video recorders inside the TVs.

And another thing….
When this blog’s proofreader was checking that the word tesselated was being correctly used, they came across this:
From Mathforum
“Only three regular polygons tessellate in the Euclidean plane: triangles, squares or hexagons.We can’t show the entire plane, but imagine that these are pieces taken from planes that have been tiled.” I like that throwaway ‘we can’t show the entire plane’.

 

It’s all hot air

Letters to todays Times: Councillor Jenny Jones of the Green Party Group on the London Assembly writes “In London alone, homes produce enough CO2 every year to fill almost seven million hot air balloons.”
Why hot air balloons? you don’t use CO2 in hot air balloons because CO2 is heavier than air. Might it be to give a suggestion of unbearable heat? Why not enough CO2 to create an iceberg of incredibly cold frozen dry ice with a surface temperature of -78.5 degrees centigrade?