Dumb

Now I like small and beautiful as much as the next person, and would use a MacBook Air as a second PC for travelling, but the latest marketing message is just dumb. As the BBC put it, ‘The MacBook Air is 0.11 inches thick at its thinnest point’.

But the important info isn’t that of the thinnest point, but of the thickest point. A really thick laptop could have a thin wedge sticking out; even an equilateral triangular prism has a thinnest point approaching zero.

No, what matters is the thickest point. It’s the thickest point that determines whether it fits in a given laptop bag, goes through your letter box. If the laptop was 0.11 inches thick at the thickest point, then that would impress me.

In fact, that’s what drew me to the story. At first I thought it said simply that the laptop was 0.11 inches thick, and I assumed it was a misprint as it’s impossible. But hey, many people actually have reproduced the story as ‘MacBook Air now 0.11 in thick’, and have fallen for the spin completely: I take it they failed geometry at school.

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An order of magnitude

We know many people are bad at maths. However, most mistakes are easily spotted through experience and common sense. But sometimes, common sense is lacking: here I’m talking about the Conservatives gaff on teenage pregnancy.

So first, the Conservatives. A few days ago they launched a document called Labour’s Two Nations, that was supposed to show how there is great inequality in Britain today (let’s ignore the fact that the rise in inequality happened in the 1980s). What they wanted to point out was that under-18 girls in the most deprived areas are three times more likely to become pregnant than in the least deprived areas (Guardian). It’s not clear what this means with regards to ‘most deprived’ and ‘areas’ – I think it’s top and bottom centiles and districts – and I’m sure I could find a more shocking figure if I chose a harsher definition of most and least deprived. The mistake they did make, though, was to divide 54 by 1000 and come up with 54% not 5.4%. That’s if they did a calculation: some social statistics come as ‘per 1000’ or ‘per 10,000’ and it’s important to notice this.

This matters for two reasons. First, because 54% v 18% is a big difference and much more significant than a difference between 5.4% and 1.8% (significant thought this is). Second, because anyone with any sense would realise that 54%, that is over half, is completely absurd.  Anywhere with 54% of its teenagers pregnant would have babies everywhere. Either the writer and editor just missed this, or they genuinely believed that there could be such a place and they are massively out of touch with normal life.