Forget the ‘precautionary principle.’ The amount of risk to which the public should be exposed is greater than zero. —Michael Krauss, Financial Post, June 20, 2008.
Almost without exception the critical or contentious issues of our times involve numbers–even “intelligent design” advocates usually try to juggle inconvenient dates or data. Errors with numbers are ubiquitous. Sometimes these are amusing as with:
Ideal Toy Company stated on the package of the original Rubik cube that there were more than three billion possible states the cube could attain. It’s analogous to MacDonald’s proudly announcing that they’ve sold more
Continue reading Numeracy, relative risk and public policy