statistics – Page 2 – don't confuse the narrator

the weight of the world

I suspect I’m one of the few women of my age group who has never been on a diet; I was a skinny child and my mother used to tell me I wouldn’t put on weight until I got “a contented mind”.

I’m not sure that’s what happened, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore all the media hype about obesity and health: what used to be reserved for the pages of women’s magazines seems to have spilled over into the general press, and I’ve been aware for a while that my BMI is up at the top end of the acceptable range.

The latest article to catch my eye is on the BBC Health page, entitled “Where are you on the global fat scale?”.
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millions and billions

Rabbit reading by Lance Tooks — drawing courtesy Lance Tooks

I was intrigued by the BBC website Magazine story entitled Do the dead outnumber the living?

My attention was caught in particular by the table at the end showing a total for the number of people who have ever lived as 107,602,707,791.
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from this week’s news

A couple of things that have caught my eye on the BBC website this week.

First, from the ‘most popular’ links, comes this:

Sadly, it doesn’t mean that having children can drive you to drink, which is what I imagined. It actually linked through to a story with the headline “Parenting style strongly affects drinking, Demos says”.

The second is from a story about UK social surveys and comes under the headline Why state surveys asked about bras and haddock.
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nonvital statistics

My university maths lecturer would never have believed it, but now, 30-something years later, I am fascinated by statistics. So my attention was caught when I visited the ‘Freshy Pressed‘ page which shows some of the recent posts on blogs hosted by WordPress.com.

I took a screen shot of the stats box yesterday afternoon and then again today, just over 24 hours later:

'Freshy pressed' - WordPress stats, Saturday 4:00pm — Saturday

'Freshy pressed' - WordPress stats, Sunday 4:27pm — Sunday

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feedback

I’ve not been getting much in the way of junk comments on the blog recently, but I still occasionally remember to check and make sure the system hasn’t thrown anything away by mistake. Sadly, all these encouraging remarks were correctly identified as spam: