What's wrong with division?

[Derek Smith]

I've just been watching a couple of programmes on astronomy.

The phrase 'ten times as small' came up in both of them.

What happened to one-tenth the size?

It irritates me. Does anyone else want to start a petition? It seems to work for Clarkson.

We might get a number of contributors 1,000 times as many but lower.

[Eric Mc]

Sounds very divisive.

[marshalla]

At least they said "as small" rather than "times smaller than".

I am fed up of hearing something like "7 times bigger than 6" misused.

However, 10 times as small should mean 10 times the size of the original.

[Simpo Two]

Ah but how many elephants is that? The punters can only understand elephants, football pitches and Olympic-sized swimming pools.

[marshalla]

Simpo Two said:

Ah but how many elephants is that? The punters can only understand elephants, football pitches and Olympic-sized swimming pools.

and Waleses.

[Simpo Two]

I think we have a new system emerging:

Length: Times round the world
Area: Football pitches
Volume: Olympic-sized swimming pools
Weight: Elephants

Any more?

We shall call it 'SI' - System Idiote...

[SpeckledJim]

Simpo Two said:

I think we have a new system emerging:

Length: Times round the world
Area: Football pitches
Volume: Olympic-sized swimming pools
Weight: Elephants

Any more?

We shall call it 'SI' - System Idiote...

Short distances - wingspan of a 'jumbo jet'

[SpeckledJim]

SpeckledJim said:

Simpo Two said:

I think we have a new system emerging:

Length: Times round the world
Area: Football pitches
Volume: Olympic-sized swimming pools
Weight: Elephants

Any more?

We shall call it 'SI' - System Idiote...

Short distances - wingspan of a 'jumbo jet'

Even shorter distances - length of a London bus. Significance of London: unknown.

[RobM77]

One that gets me is the media's refusal to use percentages, and I think that's also linked to 'dumbing down' as most people apparently don't really understand percentages (according to my wife, who as a GP speaks to the general public every day). For example, according to the media, tax always changes by "pennies in the pound" and quite often people just say "2p increase" leaving out the pound bit. Very confusing. Even worse is the constant reporting of numbers as absolute numbers, rather than percentages, such as "20,000 more people in the UK per year need x" or "we have x number of immigrants per year" - percentages would be so much more illuminating in those examples. Not only that, but the media never normalise statistics with respect to the population increase - it's meaningless, and frequently misleading, to compare absolute numbers of patients, companies, services etc between two years unless you factor in population growth. Sometimes the media can be inferring an increase, when if you factor in population growth is actually a decrease in percentage terms. It almost makes reading any statistic from the media completely pointless.

[Derek Smith]

RobM77 said:

One that gets me is the media's refusal to use percentages, and I think that's also linked to 'dumbing down' as most people apparently don't really understand percentages (according to my wife, who as a GP speaks to the general public every day). For example, according to the media, tax always changes by "pennies in the pound" and quite often people just say "2p increase" leaving out the pound bit. Very confusing. Even worse is the constant reporting of numbers as absolute numbers, rather than percentages, such as "20,000 more people in the UK per year need x" or "we have x number of immigrants per year" - percentages would be so much more illuminating in those examples. Not only that, but the media never normalise statistics with respect to the population increase - it's meaningless, and frequently misleading, to compare absolute numbers of patients, companies, services etc between two years unless you factor in population growth. Sometimes the media can be inferring an increase, when if you factor in population growth is actually a decrease in percentage terms. It almost makes reading any statistic from the media completely pointless.

Have you considered that the fact that it is unclear is the reason such absolute figures are used?

[Simpo Two]

I put it down to journalists being having no knowledge of basic science.