Flood Defence Spending
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2016
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello my name is Tim Harford and this is the podcast of the Radio 4 edition of more or less that was first |
| 0:06.4 | broadcast on Friday the 8th of January 2016. |
| 0:11.2 | Apologies to loyal listeners of the podcast, you will have heard some of these items before on our |
| 0:16.1 | world service feed, but there is new material, we'll be talking about flood spending, and we |
| 0:21.0 | will be presenting the largest mistake in the history of more or less. |
| 0:25.0 | So I hope there will still be something for you to enjoy. |
| 0:28.0 | Hello and welcome to a brand new series of more or less, |
| 0:32.0 | unless you count our New Year's Day program as part of this |
| 0:34.9 | series and as loyal listeners will know, we are all about figuring out what counts, what |
| 0:39.8 | doesn't, and whether the numbers that surround us really add up. |
| 0:44.0 | This week we will count the size of the Galactic Empire's Army. |
| 0:49.0 | We'll ask why one in a hundred year floods seem to be happening all the time, and we present for your pleasure the largest mistake that has ever been heard on |
| 0:59.0 | more or less. But first flooding has been on our minds. Some listeners are worried about the |
| 1:06.1 | Prime Minister's geography skills including loyal listener Anna. |
| 1:10.0 | David Cameron speaking on a visit to York where hundreds of people have been moved from their homes. |
| 1:15.0 | Dear more or less, the Prime Minister claimed we spend more per head on flood defences in the north of England than we do in the south of England. |
| 1:22.0 | Is this true? The Financial Times reports |
| 1:25.6 | that these numbers use the Environment Agency's definition of North, which bizarrely |
| 1:30.4 | includes Peterborough, but not Manchester or Liverpool, these cities are apparently in the West. |
| 1:37.0 | As someone who grew up between Manchester and Liverpool, this is news to me. |
| 1:42.0 | To be fair, Peterborough is north of Eaton, |
| 1:44.7 | and we don't really know what the Prime Minister had in mind |
... |
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