Aviamotornaya

Pinch of salt time.  The math-pop writer John Allen Paulos has a great book called "A Mathematician reads the Newspapers" in which he cites examples of headlines that have brought him up all standing: "Duh, that's can't be true".  It is the sequel to Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences which is, IMO, fresher and better but both books are informative and readable.  They help tune into nonsense.

I have two loyal readers in Russia (and two in Ukraine, so you might think that people at the further edge of Europe might stop squabbling about Lenin, Oil and The West and see how much common ground they have in reading The Blob). My interest in events in Russia is accordingly higher than my interest in events in, say, Venezuela where lots of oil is produced by nobody reads El Blob - so forget them.  If you hunt hard you will have heard about a recent derailment in the Moscow Metro which killed a couple of dozen people and is currently under investigation. One tragedy stands on the shoulders of another and many reports refer to the Aviamotornaya (Авиамото́рная) escalator disaster in 1982. In that case, new operating machinery for all escalators was being installed across the metro system including at that station.  You really need something to help mass transport in such places because the platform in 150m below ground and that's a long way to walk. There was sufficient redundancy designed into the system, but the engineer who installed the back-up emergency brake hadn't read the instruction booklet, so it was wired incorrectly. Everything was fine until one of the steps derailed and stripped off the gears of the drive mechanism putting the loop into neutral (= freefall).  The brake didn't kick in automatically and the the hand-brake was also disabled, so 100 passengers were whooshed to the bottom and dumped in a heap.  Eight people near the bottom were killed.  As it was in Soviet times, when everything mechanical must work fine because all the engineers have a red star on their lapels, the event never made the newspapers so the rumor mill clicked into action instead. Dead people on escalators must mean that they were sucked into the mechanism and turned into hamburger - and it was so . . . not!

Not believing Wikipedia, I thought to check other sites for better details and assumed English Pravda would be authoritative but this headline Moscow Metro Kills Over 1,500 Every Year is where my Paulos-trained crap-detector kicked in.  Can't be true, and it's not.  It should read Moscow Metro Injures Over 1,500 Every Year which is less exciting but less fatal. Lost in translation?

Limbo

This summer Ireland has been smoking with the heat of discussion about abortion.  A couple of weeks ago, President Higgins signed into law extremely limited conditions in which a termination might be permitted to take place in The Holy Land.  Predictably, because so few politicians and commentators are women of child-bearing age, there was a lot of vaporing on behalf of fetuses by those who would never be at the personal hard-end of a decision on the matter.  But enough of the talk (too much of that already!), let's look at the numbers.

Data type	2011	2012	Rate
IrAddr-Abortions	4,149	3,982	0.09%
UK-Abortions	189,931	185,122	0.29%

The Rate is based on the population of RoI being 4,588,000 (2011) and UK 63,182,000 (2011), the latter being about 14x greater than the former.  A month ago when these numbers first became available (Newstalk FM has just picked up on it today - hence the post) the Irish Times reported that the number of Irishwomen having an abortion in the UK had fallen: "The figures represent a reduction on the previous year’s statistics".  To which I patiently assert No They Haven't.  There is no statistically significant difference (ChiSq = 3.4; 1 d.f.; p > 0.05) between the numbers, so it would be more accurate and informative to say that the rate is unchanged.  The Irish Times has an excellent Science Correspondent in Dick Ahlstrom. I wish he'd give his Arts Block educated colleagues a brief talk about statistics, so they don't spout such discreditable nonsense in future.  Harumph!

The excellent A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995) is by John Allen Paulos and I've cited Edward MacNeil's Mathsemantics in February.  Both of these books encourage you to look at numbers like those in the table above and ask do they make sense?  These say that the rate of  abortions is three times higher in the UK than among those giving an Irish address.  I don't believe it.  According to the 2001 census, there are 850,000 Irish-born people living in the UK, and there are more people on that side of the water (about 6 million) who have an Irish grand-parent (and are thus eligible to play soccer for the national team and apply for an Irish passport) than such people in the Republic.  That latter number must be less than 4,588,000 because of our many wonderful-and-welcome Issei immigrants.  So there can't be many young women without a friend-and-relation in the UK who will give them a bed for the night while they deal with a problem.

So, by applying common sense and internal consistency to the missing data, I reckon that the number of Irish women travelling to the UK for abortions is somewhere between twice and three times the number which is reported because it is the only number with a proper paper trail.  I suppose that many (older?) members of the Catholic church would believe these missing unbaptised data have been assigned to Limbo.

More Math Book

I had a troika of math-for-normals books on the go in parallel at the end of May.  One The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets (2013) by Simon Singh was admittedly more for noodles than for normals. Maths On The Back of an Envelope (2019) by Rob Eastaway is in the tradition of John Allen Paulos [whom bloboprevs] and his A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995). Numeracy is important to prevent yourself or your granny being gulled by nonsense which appears in modern media. Eastaway could, with Simon Singh, Simon Clark, Hannah Fry, Tim Harford, James Grime, Adam Rutherford, Matt Parker, Marcus du Sautoy, Alex Bellos [yes all of blobochecked] make up a cricket team of Explainers of Maths resident in the UK: who therefore know the difference among googol, google and googly.

I twigged that Eastaway was more than {one book picked of a library shelf in rural Ireland} when he wrote about being called up for a crap-detecting soundbyte by local radio. And also about canvassing an audience of teenagers for the weight in stones (rather than kilos which have been curriculum official in UK for the last 50 years). No surprises that he has worked with the UK Math Trust where Gdau.I is currently wrestling kangaroos. Ten years ago he won-a-gong from the IMA [Institute of Mathematics and its Applications] and he's written a dozen books

One of the themes in Envelope is getting numbers correct but not too correct. When RTE reports that 48.34% of people support the bacon-and-cabbage for dinner movement, the number is a blur while "half" or "50%" can be taken in. If  the number is absorbed it may trigger a question like "I wonder what the proportion was in 1996?". It was a time of transition, in 1997 my farming neighbour confessed that his family had frozen pizza for dinner the day before: induced to do so by his teenage daughter. Eastaway suggests using Zequals (a new coinage of his) when trying to get into the right ballpark. Zqualling strips all but the first significant digit. So 7 stays as 7, but 83 ⇒ 80;  83.78 ⇒ 80; 8,452 ⇒ 8000. Pre-process your sums to Zequals and you won't need a calculator but still get a good enough answer: 98 ÷ 5.3 ≈ 100 ÷ 5 = 20.

 Since we got our solar panels, my life is ruined by the kW app on my device. I put off baking until the sun is giving enough to get the oven to 200°C "for free". I put on the immersion when the sun is making 5.25kW [the max] resolving to wash A Lot of dishes or one elderly body before the water gets cold. Towards the end of Envelope, Eastaway offers a poser: which of the following uses the most electricity:

• fridge
• TV on standby
• shower 
• kettle 

Depending on how much tea you drink and how many oxters you possess, shower or kettle (~ 2000W) will win. Leaving fridge ~50W and TV-standby ~2W in the ha'penny place. Apparently, back in the day, TVs would get warm even when nothing was showing, and there was a desultory campaign to make folk unplug them when they went to bed. Not so since we did away with cathode ray tubes and went LED pixels. I knew all that, but Eastaway then riffs on to point out that the family Yaris runs at 20kW or 10x the kettle! "A 30 minute car journey uses more energy than all your domestic appliances put together: that's something to think about when doing the school run". Yes indeed. It reminds me of my dear old dad who would periodically get cost conscious and go though the house flipping off switches while muttering "every light blazing" and "harumph". And then he'd drive into town and buy another lawn-gizmo to clutter his shed.

Nothing in excess [as Delphi sed μηδὲν ἄγαν] is all very well but some excesses are way more excessive than others. Cows burping methane is waaaay more than human pooting the stuff after Beanz Meanz Heinz even accounting for there being 6x more people than cattle on the planet. We shd all give up the ould burgers [two too many poo R]: mutton, chicken, pork are all easier on the planet and lentils least of all.  But cars are an even bigger burden.