Chicken or egg?
WHICH CAME FIRST, the chicken or the egg? It’s an old problem. The chicken had to come from an egg; but the egg had to come from a chicken. Or did it? Chickens evolved, just as people evolved. So there must have been a first chicken, before which there was a Jurassic chickenosaurus, or whatever. But there […]
Giant spiders
WHY CAN’T PEOPLE BE TWICE THE SIZE? Why don’t we see giant spiders, like we do in the movies, in real life? It’s staple of science fiction movies, after all. So is it possible? In a word, no. There’s a good reason why spiders have thin spindly legs, while elephants have great thick chunky ones. […]
Conspicuous lack of aliens
IF THERE IS INTELLIGENT LIFE out there, why haven’t we been visited by aliens yet? It’s a question that every child, and most adults, will ask at some point or other. Think of it this way. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the fastest earth-made rocket travelled at just under 50,000 miles an hour. How […]
Damned lies and statistics
WHAT’S THE MOST DANGEROUS SPORT? By which I mean, which sport has the most fatalities during play? It’s not motor racing, or hang gliding, or extreme ironing, or potholing, or even mountaineering. Or any of the sports you might traditionally think of as dangerous. It’s bowls. Why? Because bowls is played by old people, and they’re more […]
Baked bean lies
“A MILLION HOUSEWIVES CAN’T BE WRONG.” So ran a TV commercial for Heinz Baked Beans in the 1970s. But a million housewives can be wrong. Every last one of them. Just because a lot of people all do the same thing doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
Yes, and no
ALL OUR MATHEMATICS, and consequently all our science, is based on the logical concept that philosophers call the Law of the Excluded Middle. This states that every proposition is either true or not true, but not both. It sounds obviously the case, but it doesn’t always apply to the real world. There are degrees of truth. […]
Finger counting
HOW HIGH CAN YOU COUNT on your fingers? 10? Pah. I can count up to 1,023. Here’s how it’s done. It’s useful if you want to count the number of people who turned up to your birthday party, or count the number of times a politician says “family” in a speech. Imagine each of your fingers […]
8 billion names
I CALCULATED RECENTLY that 267 (in other words, 26 multiplied by itself seven times) is 8,031,810,176. Which means that, as there are 26 letters in the alphabet, there would be enough combinations for everyone on the planet to be identified by a unique seven-letter word. With a few spares, so you could weed out the rude […]
How much is a million?
WE USE NUMBERS like million and billion every day, without really thinking about what they mean. Apple sold 70 million iPhones in the last quarter. There are 13 million people living in Tokyo. But a million is such a vast, unwieldy number that few of us have a real grasp of what it means. So […]