Crap statistics
Spare a thought for Angela Merkel as her government has been through hell trying to explain away statistics relating to a somewhat different issue. Why, the German press and Green party wanted to know, has the German army been consuming such a prodigious number of loo rolls?
According to accounts released by the Bundeswehr, the average German soldier gets through ten rolls of lavatory paper a day, or 3,650 rolls a year – quite an achievement given that the average German civilian gets by with 73. (The figure for the average Briton, incidentally, is 110 rolls a year, for the American 98, and for the EU citizen, 77.5.) Was it something in the army diet? Were the rolls used for target practice? It took days of patient computer analysis to come up with the answer.
The statistic was wrong: it should have referred to “sheets of paper” not rolls.
The soldiers were frugal after all; it was the statistics that were “crap”.
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What this story tells us, I think, is that “lies, lies and damned statistics” can’t just be attributed to the deviousness of ministers. Sure, politicians pick the figures that aid their cause, just as journalists do: but anyone who has collected official statistics, as I have, knows how astonishingly arbitrary the process is. Even the definition of whatever it is you’re collecting is error-prone. How many sheets does a loo roll need to be a roll? Doesn’t seem quite fair to blame politicians for not knowing such things.
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Comments
By Sue | Office Furniture on August 25th, 2009 at 11:33 am
That is the funniest thing that I have ever read, how on earth does someone go through that many loo rolls in a single day, what do they do with it, that is just crazy!!!!
By Kim Da Cook on August 26th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Wow what a survey, that just can’t be right that one person can go through that amount of loo rolls. I just don’t understand how though. Some one really has to see what these men are eating and what the army is providing.:)
By Vinny | Kitchen Design on August 26th, 2009 at 8:59 am
I had to share this with the boys in the office oh my word we were rolling on the floor in laughter, as a man I had no idea that one could go through that amount of bog roll ever, and men are proud of their toilet achievements.