Flood Defence Spending

More or Less: Behind the Stats

• Episode: Flood Defence Spending
• Website: More or Less: Behind the Stats
• Feed URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrss1/episodes/downloads.rss
• Duration: 00:24:12
• Published: 2016-01-08 18:00

Tim Harford and the team take a look at some of the numbers in the news about flooding. What is a one hundred year flood? And is there really a north-south divide in the amount of money spent on flood defences in England?

What is the total number of possible tweets that could be created from 140 characters? In a recent programme Professor John Allen-Paulos told us that when you take into account all of the symbols available, the total number of possible tweets is Googol2.8 (which is a 1 followed by 280 zeros.) But has he missed some options?

One of our listener’s questions whether Christmas Eve is really the busiest day on the roads. We take a look at the figures.

Plus – which is the bigger number? The total number of Storm Trooper toys ever made, or the number of real life soldiers serving in armies around the world?