Your comments: Spring series 2008

If you have any comments or suggestions for More or Less then click hereto find an e-mail form. We read and value all your e-mails but we cannot promise a reply.

We would also like to know about your encounters with numbers, whether mystifying, strange or even beautiful.

And we hope you will join us in keeping a watchful eye on the way numbers are used and reported.

Read e-mails responding to topics in the Winter 2007 series

The views expressed on these pages are not necessarily the views of the BBC. The comments published will reflect the balance of views we receive.

YOUR COMMENTS:

Re stress at work: My Victorian copy of 'Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management' has a medical section which comments that gastric ulcer is 'most frequently met with in young servants', a perception quite different from our modern idea of ulcer caused by executive stress. Young servants would have been the bottom of the household pecking order, of course, but would their ulcers have been due to poor diet or psychological stress? Incidentally, opium and morphia are recommended treatments! Your programme is always interesting, even though I have always been hopeless at maths. Best wishes, Jane Jakeman
Jane Jakeman, uk

Cardiovascular disease is a very large killer of rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries. In the past in the U.K. it affected rich people rather than the poor. When this set of diseases affected the rich it tended to narrow the life expectancy gap between the rich and poor. Now that it affects the poor it tends to widen the gap. The liability to these diseases is affected by the mothers nutrition around the time of birth. In the course of time we might expect cardiovascular diseases to cease to be major killers and when that happens the life expectancy gap will narrow.
Ian Longhurst,

The atmospheric content of CO2 is around 0.03% If it goes to 0.04% this is always quoted in the press as an increase of 30%. You could just as well say it's an increase of 0.01%. But this doesn't sound very much. I think people have a political axe to grind when they use percentages to make something seem bigger or smaller. The 30% figure is ignoring all the other gases in the atmosphere. If you had a bucket with 996 white balls and 3 red balls in it, and you added one more red ball you'd have a job to see the difference. But if it had 66 white balls and 33 red balls and you added another 30 red balls you'd easily see the difference. I should have thought the first example more accurately reflects the atmospheric content. An example the other way round is that the chancellor has reduced income tax from 22% to 20%. This is always portrayed as 2% reduction by the opposition. But if you expressed it the same way as they do the CO2, it would be a 10% reduction. Do you think expressing the CO2 increase as 0.01% is a more accurate representation of the fact?
Richard Farnsworth, England

How can the diet of the mother have any link to the gender of the child if it (the gender) is determined by the Y chromosome which comes from the father?!
I.Bova, UK

Maths Joke - question: Why did the chicken cross the Möbius band? Answer: To get to the same side.
Mr Clive Gulliver, UK

I caught the end of the programme where Manningtree was crowned as the UK pub capital on the basis (if my memory serves me) it had 5 pubs, equating to one pub per 900 population, or thereabouts. In what way is 5 pubs considered to be remarkable? I wouldn't be surprised if 5 adjacent buildings in, say, Newcastle were licensed premises. I'd say it was only truly "remarkable" if you visited the place and remarked on the number of pubs relative to the size of the place. As previosuly commented, try Otley, West Yorks. Whilst Otley has probably around 20 or so licensed premises, it needs to be factored in that official town population is considerably swelled by rural residents who may live several miles away. However, if you include all the rural pubs who are't included as being part of Otley town centre, but who's residents are included in the town's official population, the relative numbers are likely to be very different. What exactly are you trying to demonstrate?
Dave Scratter,

I moot Whitchurch, Hampshire. Population at the last census was 4,500. It claims to be the smallest town (I.e. Has a mayor & council). There are 6 pubs: the Railway, the White Hart, the George, The Bell, the Kings Arms and the Harvest Home. There is also a sports & social club, but I'm not sure if you count those. That's one pub for every 750 people, if you don't count the social club.
Mike

The 'town' of Crask Inn (in Sutherland) consists of just that: one inn.
David Jones, Scotland

Some of the places nominated for the highest pub to people ratio are very impressive, but they cant compete with Shardlow on the Derbyshire Leicestershire border, the population is around 1,000 and they have 7 pubs. That is a ratio of 1 pub to 129 people.
Tony Saffell, England

I don't have up to date information but this might be of interest. In 1873 Norwich had 596 pubs and 42 beer houses. This amounted to one drinking house for every 121 of the population. These official data from the Select Committee on Intemperance reveal the highest ratio for any major urban centre in England. Curiously Norwich also had the lowest rate of drunkenness. Of course Norwich is a city and not a town. But this is a strange distinction in this context because city status is not determined by size but by royal charter.
Roger Munting, England

In your article on foods eaten around time of conception and subsequent gender of babies born, one important possibility seems to have been overlooked. It could be that women who have just conceived a child may rather rapidly develop a strong taste for a particular food (e.g. cereal). Food cravings are a well known phenomenon later in pregnancy. Hence the food preference may be influenced by the conceived sex rather than vice versa.
Paul Johnson, UK

On your last program you quoted research that suggested that the eating habits of women when they conceived influenced the gender of their baby. Even if the statistics were significant and reliable, across many identical repeated studies, it still doesn't mean that the eating habits influenced gender. Just because they correlate, does not mean there is causality. In this case, there is probably a hormonal or genetic factor which influences the gender of the baby, and also happens to influence eating habits. Similarly, I once heard that average global divorce rates correlated more closely with average global temperatures than C02 emissions did! Now that I mention Global warming, could you examine the view that C02 emissions appear to lag behind average global temperatures. How does that figure???'
Charles

I think Alston in Cumbria has the greatest concentration of pubs. There are currently 7 pubs open in the town (one other closed recently) and the population (in 2001 census) was 1128 which gives 161.1428 per pub.
Veronica, UK

The town with the most pubs I believe could be Oswestry in Shropshire.
Ruth Woodward, UK

Please may I ask, what has happened to the assertion that the sex of a child is determined by the chromosomes of the sperm?
Pam Eyles, mother of five sons.

You ask for towns (not cities or villages) but you have a problem in that legally there is no distinction between towns and villages. The individual community can choose (or rather its Local -Parish/Town- Council can) and the only consequence is that it is now a town and therefore the leader of the council is now the mayor. It is a measure of the importance of this decision that a Local Council can make it. For all practical purposes they are merely flavours of the same thing. There are some very small towns and some very large villages (Kiddlington in Oxfordshire is I think the largest). It is really a matter of how the community wish to regard themselves.
David

I grew up in the small town of Wareham (in fact, I think it is either the smallest or second smallest town in the country according to official standards). Anyway, it is an old walled Saxon town. It takes about 5 minutes to walk from one side of town to the other and I would hazard a guess that on the journey you will pass about 12 pubs, if not more. I'm sure you have someone who could calculate the "public-house density" of Wareham town for you so I won't bother but I thought you might like to know.
Sebastian Brogan, UK

Your debate about schools and the comments on this page show two problems with how people approach statistics. The first, as pointed out in the program, is that we can never say that a life-choice that we made was good or bad, we end up judging our real experience against a prediction that we have made, a model that may or may not be good. The second, which always fascinates me that for many, many people, one good anecdote will outweigh any well-conducted scientific study - "my granddad lived to 87 and smoked 30 a day".
Danny McKillop, UK

I've just listened to the latest podcast of your program on my drive into work - very interesting. The podcast finished and my iPod started to play music in its shuffle mode. Which tune did it play? Mathematics by Cherry Ghost - it made me smile.
Simon Brown, UK

My daughter went to a local comprehensive at 11, and was hated and bullied by other girls, not only because she kept coming top, but she was good looking and could sing and was picked to sing the leading role in the annual play. At 14 she passed the exam for our local grammar school, and subsequently "flew". She said at that time going there was the best day of her life. Everyone she said was now great fun, the work extended her, she was no longer top. Later she joined the 95% that went to a Russell University.
David Vinter, UK

I listened to the programme on the 14th April, you talked about sending children to worse performing schools and achieving their potential. I know however that if I had gone to the local comprehensive instead of the grammar they would have never picked up on my dyslexia and consequently my autism or had the skills or facilities to help. At school I regularly go to help sessions run by teachers; as a result I have got better with spelling and typing etc...Your other point was about D and D you mentioned that it was not for the popular, but our group of 6 started at school ranges from people in "the in crowd" to "the Boffs/nerds". We have had to turn people down because it is so popular we have been told to stop playing "a silly game" and "play outside" so we do it weekends instead of everyday so it would be unfair to say that it is just for nerds but it does move in small circles.
Matthew, Buckinghamshire

Re the item on 14th April on Zimbabwe inflation: Yes, a figure like 100,000% annual inflation is difficult to picture. I would like to suggest taking a leaf out of the science of radioactivity and using half-life instead. A rough calculation suggests that 100,000% annual inflation equals a half-life of about 36 days. In other words, your money loses half its value in just over a month, every month. Now that is something everyone can understand.
Tom Ruben, UK

As a war gamer of some years (mid 1990s onwards) I was interested to hear your article on D&D and the mathematical spine that runs through it. Mathematics runs through all areas of war gaming from the dice that you mention as well as the scales that war games miniatures are made to, 1:56th scale, 1:76th (The one true scale :O) etc and also figure ratios, where number of men/creatures represented by a model are essential numerical factors. I was only disappointed by your slightly disparaging attitude towards Roleplay-war gaming, as it does not help us promote the hobby to today's digitally indoctrinated "youth". Surely pride in ones interests should be broadcast from the rooftops.
Ian Armstrong, UK