It’s been a while since I added an entry in the CrayStats category. On my drive back home tonight, I heard a gem, courtesy of both British and French public broadcast. So I guess it’s not just a problem at NPR.
I was listening to a podcast from a history program from France Inter (French public radio). It was about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. They played a clip from a BBC program that explained that the lava coming down was “five times hotter than boiling water”, a figure that the French host later repeated.
Never mind the fact that, on the Kelvin scale, the same lava is only twice as hot as boiling water. More on the siliness of applying percentages to temperatures here.
I love finding and pointing out the misuse of stats, or even better, just plain wrong stats. Last year I heard a newsie assert that the glaciers in Iceland store most of the world’s fresh water, and if they melt, the ocean could raise 200 feet. The scientific ignorance of the average American is deplorable. The scientific ignorance of the above average American is alarming.