statistics – Page 4 – don't confuse the narrator

a number of questions

Or, perhaps, a question of numbers.

A headline in today’s El Mundo says that 4,158 million euros has been lost in the last ten years due to political corruption. Except, it being Spanish, it doesn’t say it quite like that:

Headline: la corrupción política ha sustraído al menos 4.158 millones en 10 años

The Spanish use “million” in the plural after a number, giving phrases like seis millones rather than “six million”. They also use a full stop as the thousands separator and a comma where we use a decimal point.
Continue reading “a number of questions”

don’t confuse the slaughtered pig

list of search phrases — blog standard searches

WordPress – which is where this blog is hosted – provide statistics so bloggers can see how many readers they have and what brings them to the site.

I’m intrigued by the readers who arrive from search engines looking for specific things.

Or, more accurately, I’m intrigued by the things they are looking for. The image on the left shows the most popular search strings from a couple of days ago.

The variety of ways that people think of for searching for the same basic idea fascinates me. But, after all, if there’s more than one way to kill a cat, there’s probably more than one way to slaughter a pig.
Continue reading “don’t confuse the slaughtered pig”

lying swine

Well, no, of course, it isn’t the pigs themselves who are lying, and I should probably feel guilty about adding to their bad press, but pigs have had plenty of air-time already on this blog and at least this time the post is about humans dying, not – at least not directly – about pigs being slaughtered.

Looking around the web, swine ‘flu is causing all sorts of reactions, from panic, to ridicule. It’s clearly thought to be important by many, as this screen shot from the BBC site indicates:

kilometers of ink?

Although the ballpoint mechanism was first patented in 1888, it was another 40 years before Biro invented and commercialised the first popular ballpoint pen, the Bic, in 1938.

Since then, the technology has come a long way and different “biros” offer very different value for money. At least, so it would seem from this Spanish consumer report.