Flood Defence Spending
More or Less: Behind the Stats
English - January 08, 2016 17:00 - 24 minutes - 22.2 MB - ★★★★★ - 740 ratingsNews Education Science Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Tim Harford and the team take a look at some of the numbers in the news about flooding. What is a one hundred year flood? And is there really a north-south divide in the amount of money spent on flood defences in England?
What is the total number of possible tweets that could be created from 140 characters? In a recent programme Professor John Allen-Paulos told us that when you take into account all of the symbols available, the total number of possible tweets is Googol2.8 (which is a 1 followed by 280 zeros.) But has he missed some options?
One of our listener’s questions whether Christmas Eve is really the busiest day on the roads. We take a look at the figures.
Plus – which is the bigger number? The total number of Storm Trooper toys ever made, or the number of real life soldiers serving in armies around the world?