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?

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