100% wrong
"Disposable income at lowest level in ten years",
screams the Telegraph, still presumably on election alert. Actually a more accurate headline would be "Disposable income at highest level in ten years". But the whole survey is screwy - if the household income looks rather on the high side it's because they have simply divided GDP by the number of households.
Labels: Pointless statistical stuff
Baked potatoes
Much better in the oven than the microwave, of course, but you really have to give them at least an hour and a half [changed from two - see comments].
If you have an electric oven, say one of 4,000 watts, this means power consumption of 6kwh. Apparently not only does this cost about 60p in electricity, but chucks out roughly 3kg of CO2 (it depends on the mix of sources of electricity generation, but this is the UK average).
This is turn is equivalent to driving 11 miles in an average UK car, or 18 miles in a Toyota Prius (or about 3 miles in a Lamborghini, which is not so good).
Any of the above calculations might be wrong - I'm not sure if electric ovens are 4kw - I saw in the US they are about 5kw and I've downscaled it a bit, but I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do.
Anyway until someone tells me other, a baked potato = 11 miles round-trip in a car.
Labels: Pointless statistical stuff
The UK's ten busiest and ten least busy train stations
Here's the top 10, by ticketed entries [1], with few surprises...they are all in London except Glasgow and Manchester.
| Waterloo | 31,127,139 |
| Liverpool Street | 25,173,463 |
| Victoria | 24,052,678 |
| London Bridge | 18,352,637 |
| Charing Cross | 14,332,255 |
| Glasgow Central | 13,228,465 |
| Paddington | 12,862,902 |
| Euston | 12,849,388 |
| King's Cross | 10,453,343 |
| Manchester Piccadilly | 9,362,902 |
And here are the least busiest - I've included the region here as they are not so well known. Most seem rural stops, and I imagine there are some issues with the data here, particularly that the station Teesside Airport in Darlington only had 25 people buying tickets (I'm not even sure that is a separate station).
| Tees-Side Airport | Darlington | 25 | |
| Havenhouse | Lincolnshire | 22 | |
| Pontefract Baghill | West Yorkshire | 20 | |
| Buckenham | Norfolk | 17 | |
| Barry Links | Angus | 14 | |
| Shippea Hill | Cambridgeshire | 13 | |
| Dorking West | Surrey | 12 | |
| Watford West | Hertfordshire | 10 | |
| Gainsborough Central | Lincolnshire | 9 | |
| Golf Street | Angus | 8 | |
[1] There's a guide to the numbers, and their limitations,
here.
Labels: Pointless statistical stuff
How many Oxbridge Graduates are alive?
A strange question, but one to which I might need the answer for another post. An estimate will do, so the idea here is to start with the undergraduates it churns out each year, and work backwards assuming that more and more are dead, the longer ago they graduated. I am going to assume that none are alive over the age of 100, which is probably wrong, but it's not going to be the most important error here.
All the figures come from
here, which is slightly out of date, but they don't seem to have changed much in the last few years so I'm reasonably relaxed about it.
In 2004 there were 3,300 newly graduated Oxonians, whereas in 1951 there was 1,704, 1961 2,271, 1971 2,610, 1981 2,990, 1991 3,139 and 2001 3,284. For 1941 and 1931 I'm going to make the heroic assumption that it was 1000 and 700 respectively. The war will have had an impact, but I'm going to ignore it.
Anyway extrapolating between these dates, I get a total of 179,000 Oxford graduates since 1928. Now we need to know how many are dead. I thought of doing a survey of those who respond to the Magdalen College record, but I decided it might not be represenative. So I took
actuary tables for 1980 (the earliest I could find) and adjusted them downwards a bit to reflect less healthy societies (not too much, I guess Oxford graduates probably live longer than average).
We shouldn't pay too much attention to specific data, as it is going to be very inaccurate, but it tells me that there are 2 over the age of 100, and 380 of the 1945 crop. In total there are still 138,000 alive.
Phew! That's Oxford. Let's double it for Cambridge, as it's always been a sijmilar size. That makes 276,000. What about post-graduates? Are they Oxfbridge graduates? I suppose so. Many of course also were undergraduates, and the growth has been mostly in the last 30 years. So I would (again rather heroically) suggest they might amount to another 10-15%, making around 305-315,000.
Labels: Pointless statistical stuff
