Mark Williams draws our attention to this piece of Guardian numeracy:
Sometime after the plane was evacuated the phone was removed. As passengers were treated to coffee and chocolates in the Frederick Chopin VIP lounge, the elite security forces destroyed it. No explosive device was found on board. The unclaimed phone had spurred the Polish government to scramble jets, had forced thousands of tons of fuel to be dumped over the Polish countryside and had triggered an emergency landing.
Thousands of tonnes of fuel dumped from a plane with a c. 300 tonne fully laden take off weight…..
Oh how wonderful life would be without the mobile phone.
I can’t wait for the harvest so that I can swing my scythe in rhythm with the serfs on my estate.
Tons, gallons, what’s the difference? ‘Tax gap’ is millions or billions, what’s the difference? Arctic ice is growing/shrinking, what’s the difference? Numbers do not stand in the same relation to the truth for Grauniadistas as for normal people.
It’s worse than an absence of numeracy. It’s the absence of the basic critical faculty.
Isn’t the absence of basic critical faculty a prerequisite for writing for the Guardian?
50 years ago I preferred the “Daily Worker” to the Manchester Guardian, having sussed that the Manchester Guardian lifted its Vietnam war reports from the early edition of the “Daily Worker” but editing out all the triumphant reports of the assasination of village leaders and villagers who did not support the inaders in their beds at night.
Numeracy – bah! who cares? most lefties can’t do sums
Speaking of terrible Guardian articles, Paul Mason has found yet another sector where he thinks central control would be better than individual freedom:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/31/never-mind-driverless-cars-need-intelligent-transport-systems
Socialist utopia. I for one look forward to sitting in four-hour queues in a Trabant shared with smelly strangers, under the auspices of the National Transport Service.
“I have a Vision of The Future, chum,
The worker’s flats in fields of soya beans
Tower up like silver pencils, score on score:
And Surging Millions hear the Challenge come
From microphones in communal canteens
“No Right! No wrong! All’s perfect, evermore.””