I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.

In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?

Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.

A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by their

own light and that light just to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,

Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. This is more or less the statistical spine of the otherwise

floppy media. The program now airs year-round

on the BBC World Service, but this is a full-length episode from Radio 4. Hello and welcome to

More or Less, the program that's the scourge of bad statistics, sloppy mathematics, and pandas.

This week, we'll be telling the story of an equation that changed

the world of finance forever. There'll be more about nutrition and height. Forget about North and

South Korea. What about Conservative and Labour MPs? But first, let's get a brief assessment of

recent weather conditions from Carol Kirkwood in the BBC Weather Centre.

It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain.

It was a missal, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, and under two at the ankles.

It was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.

It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes. It rained a solid, glassy rain,

and it never stopped. Carol Kirkwood, with a little help from the pen of Ray Bradbury.

As the rain pause, keeping many more or less listeners inside, it seems some of you've taken the opportunity to write in and ask a number of rain-related questions, like this one

from loyal listener Jeff Wolfe.

I saw a factoid which claimed that domestic water use was only 8% of total water

consumption, implying that host pipe use is then only a fraction of that. Wesley Stevenson's here.

...