Arithmetic that makes you cringe

[hellymedic]

I suppose I should be glad I'm never up early enough to smell the full one!

The full ones might be less stinky than the empty ones on account of having less space in which to circulate StinkyGas…

… Just a thought.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I suppose I should be glad I'm never up early enough to smell the full one!

The full ones might be less stinky than the empty ones on account of having less space in which to circulate StinkyGas…

… Just a thought.

I can kind of see how that might apply if you were in the container (the rubbish is transported in shipping containers) but as this is a moving train, I'm not getting closer to it than standing on a platform (behind the yellow line of course!) as it passes.

[hellymedic]

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/driver-speeding-a40-westway-london-galicia-b1065631.html?itm_source=Internal&itm_channel=homepage_trending_article_component&itm_campaign=trending_section&itm_content=4

22 x 3 + 7 does not equal 81...

[lissotriton]

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/driver-speeding-a40-westway-london-galicia-b1065631.html?itm_source=Internal&itm_channel=homepage_trending_article_component&itm_campaign=trending_section&itm_content=4

22 x 3 + 7 does not equal 81...

Speeding can be between 3 and 6 points, depends on how much exceed the speed limit by.
And I'm not sure if that 81 includes the 7 points he already had.

[T42]

Googling a conversion just now, this wonder appeared in the "questions asked" list further down the page:

How many pounds is 70kg in stones?

[geoff]

Googling a conversion just now, this wonder appeared in the "questions asked" list further down the page:

How many pounds is 70kg in stones?

I have a feeling it might be 11

Sent from my Pixel 6a using Tapatalk

[HTFB]

5kg = 11 lb, almost bang on. So 70kg = 154lb = 11st.

The question almost makes sense, if "70kg in stones" could mean "rounded to the nearest stone" and you also don't know how many pounds a stone is.

[Legs]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-65354929

A First Folio edition of William Shakespeare's plays that was published in 1623 is being put on display.

Guildhall Library will be showcasing the rare book as part of a celebration of 400 years since the playwright's birth.

Published seven years after the Bard's death, the book contains all of his plays.

It's quite well known that Shakespeare died on his birthday, but I didn't know that he was -7 years old at the time.

[Pickled Onion]

Guardian really going for it in today's print version:

... temperatures will breach a global annual average temperature of 1.5C (34.7F) above pre-industrial levels

A quick google shows they made the exact same mistake back in January.

It gets worse

... the extra warming that comes with El Niño events will temporally push the global climate over 1.5C. The temperature may then drop back below 1.5C, allowing climate change deniers to tell everyone the world is now cooling

Certainly if the temperature drops below 1.5C that would be quite something, given it's around 14C. Extra points for not being able to spell temporarily.

ETA The online version corrects the second but not the first

[mrcharly-YHT]

For more regular running the watch consumed around 6-7% of the battery in 80 minutes with its default automatic GPS mode without music or 12% with offline music from Spotify. That’s works out to at least 22 hours of high-precision tracking, which is certainly long enough for most activities.

So it uses 12% in 80 min. I make that a battery life of 11 hours.

'At least' 22 hours should maybe be 'at most' 22hours, if you don't listen to music.

[Pingu]

It's great when units are a mixture of imperial and metric 

10.5 litres of water per mile of pipe...per minute

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2022/dec/01/down-the-drain-how-billions-of-pounds-are-sucked-out-of-englands-water-system

[Giraffe]

Sports commentator (can't recall the exact wording) re. pole vault: ...of 6", 10cm. Woman, so probably been told it's 6" before.

[Tim Hall]

Arithmetic or Bad Science, or just Not Understanding:

The other day I caught part of a documentary series on Radio 4 about the history of textiles.  Thee was a bit about textiles in sport where they mentioned Roger Bannister's lightweight running spikes he used for his sub 4 minute mile. The weight was given as 127.6 grammes. Which struck me as remarkably precise.  Have you seen felt how small a tenth of a gramme is? Putting 127.6g into any online converter gives 4.5 ounces, a much more believable figure. BBC not understanding precision and convesrion again.

[Pickled Onion]

Arithmetic or Bad Science, or just Not Understanding:

All of those, plus poor education. I remember the physics master drumming into us from day 1 that you can never have more significant figures in the result of a calculation than the least precise of the input figures. So unless that was 4.500 oz. the figure in grams is just not correct. Anyone flouting that rule got zero marks, we soon learnt.

[Kim]

Can I nominate all the BHPC racers who demonstrated an inability to count to four at the weekend?

Next time we do a fixed-laps race, I'm going to get Barney to read from the Book of Armaments on the start line.

[Mr Larrington]

'twas ever thus. Running gag in the 1980s:

Omnes: How many fingers am I holding up, Andy?

A Pegg: Thursday!

[Kim]

Yes, I'm reliably informed that the whole reason for having a jam-filled Babbage-engine is that it's better^[1] at counting laps than the average BHPC racer.  Good to have that confirmed.


_{[1] In a specific and limited way.}

[Poacher]

Straightforward one from Freeview's blurb on last night's "Shipwrecks: Britain's Sunken History".
"The terrible toll taken by shipwrecks was such that in the winter of 1820 some 20,000 seaman lost their lives in the North Sea alone. That's 20 jumbo jets."
Where are these 1,000 passenger capacity jumbos, or was an assumption made about ground casualties?

[rafletcher]

Though correct, I bridle at "dozens" being used to describe 25.

[Giraffe]

Article in BBC Science focus:
"How does the Earth cooling down affect the inner core?

This process adds 8,000 tonnes of iron to the inner core every second – the equivalent of the mass of the entire human population added daily."

C'mmon! - that's the mass of a Usanian trolley bus when full.

[L CC]

8,000 tonnes/sec
28.8 million tonnes per hour
691.2million tonnes per day

world population=8 billion
averaging 70kg (lots of those 8bn are children)
= 560 million tonnes

I think their maths is sound.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Paired with brown rice, avocado and indecent amounts of lime, black beans work splendidly in a balanced, almost five-ingredient lunch.

So why not just call it four ingredients?

[Legs]

Also playing fast 'n' loose with the conventional meaning of 'paired' there, Cudzo...

[Cudzoziemiec]

The Graun:

It’s Conservative conference time again, which means listening to multiple politicians make cringe speeches while jostling for position; fringe events that undermine everything going on in the main hall; and, this year, the probable scrapping of a £100bn infrastructure project that directly benefits the city they are in. If HS2 ends up as a train from Old Oak Common to Birmingham, Sunak should pay for it himself, or at least the three-quarters he could afford.

There's a link in there to this: https://www.politics.co.uk/reference/rishi-sunak-net-worth-2/
which tells us Sunak has £730 million...

[Pickled Onion]

Oh come on, what's a couple of orders of magnitude between friends? "the three-quarters of one percent he could afford" doesn't sound nearly as good.