Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC

makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford.

No matter what country you live in, it would have been hard in recent weeks to turn on the radio or television

and not hear things like this.

This is a CBS News special report.

I'm Jeff Glore in St. Pete Beach, Florida

with the latest on Hurricane Irma.

This powerful category for hurricane is just really beginning to batter this state.

Many hundreds of people have died in floods in South Asia, but for the American media the focus has been on hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose, which over the last month

have been battering the Caribbean and southern states in America. Wind speeds

approaching 200 miles an hour have been recorded.

And as we just heard in that CBS news report, each hurricane is given a category based on its wind speed.

This prompted Rob Eastaway to email us at more or less at BBC.co. UK.

Rob is the author of numerous books about mathematics and a longtime friend of more or less.

He was querying whether just using wind speed

...