Who writes for statisticsviews.com? You'd expect Wiley and Sons to apply some of their famous added value and fix things like unfinished sentences, which are abundant in this piece. twitter.com/MEIMaths/statu…
In reply to @christianp
this has completely nerdsniped me. The statisticsviews article cites an article in SE London local paper "News Shopper" for the majority of its factoids. That article, of course, gives no references.
In reply to @christianp
But we can do carbon-dating on the milk in swimming pools factoid! It says 2 pancakes per person, or 117 million pancakes. So the population of the UK was 117/2 = 58.5 million. That was around the turn of the Millennium (the population stat would be a year or two old when used)
In reply to @christianp
Or, the author of the factoid had a really really out of date reference book. I can't find any hits for "117 million pancakes" before 2014, so that's probably the right explanation.
In reply to @christianp
And lo, as surely as the sun rises in the east, I've found the source of the stat: an infographic released by Asda. visual.ly/community/info…
In reply to @christianp
Actually, there are two figures at play: '117 million pancakes' is oddly precise, but '2 pancakes each' could be anything between 1.5 and 2.5!
Dividing 117 million by the population of the UK in 2014, 64 million, gives 1.8 each, which does indeed round to 2
In reply to @christianp
So we're already 10% off. If you're filling swimming pools with milk, that could lead to an unfortunate spillage.
In reply to @christianp
Now, swimming pools. An Olympic pool is about 2.5 million litres big, according to google. 93 swimming pools makes 232.5 million litres. That's more than a litre per pancake!
In reply to @christianp
The recipe I use (Delia Smith's, obv.) asks for 200ml milk per batch, to make about a dozen pancakes. That's 1.95 million litres for the UK, or 78% of a single Olympic swimming pool.
In reply to @christianp
So where did 93 Olympic swimming pools come from? It's a factor of about 100 off. Centimetres instead of metres on one dimension? Misinterpreted a percentage as a real number?
In reply to @christianp
The figure for the amount of flour is easier to approximately check: 117 million is almost 10 times bigger than 13 million, so that'd be about 100g of flour per pancake.
I love pancakes more than anyone else I know, and I have never eaten a pancake that big.
In reply to @christianp
If you're sharing this article with students as a source of fun real-world stats and your prompt isn't "do these stats make the slightest bit of sense?", please reconsider.