Wine for table six….eeeeeeewwwh!!!

Canada’s infamous Globe & Mail continues to struggle with basic numeracy and simple fact checking, a colleague tells us.

Recently, they reported that Canada’s wine exports to China are 76,000 litres, which sounded suspicious from the off, as wine usually comes in 750 ml bottles. A conversion and reconversion from 20,000 gallons perhaps?

Our innumerate intern apparently must have then thought they were US gallons so with 3.78 l per US gallon gave 76,000 l. Something tells me, however, that the gallonage was in fact done in Imperial units, which has about 4.5 l per gallon, which would be 90,000 litres, which amounts to 120,000 bottles. This seems even more likely since wine shipments usually come in 12 bottle cases…you can figure out the last calculation yourself.

Also in this Saturday’s Globe & Mail, the conversion and reconversion game played out once again. Apparently, Bombardier’s Acela train runs at 240 kilometres per hour. Given that the train is based on Alstom’s Fast French Train (TGV), I am sure the French would have been able to coax out an extra 10 kph and quote it at 250 kph. The G&M has not been able communicate to its intern that if you multiply kph by 0.6 to get miles (in this case 150mph), you have to divide by 0.6 to get kph, not multiply by 8/5. If this conversion/reconversion were repeated enough, eventually the speed of the train would approach 0 kph (which would be relatively ironic in Einstein Year! Ed.).

As it happens, this particular error in significant digits was quite prescient. Amtrak has
taken this train out of service due to mechanical flaws; so it really is going 0 kph!

At least the G&M attempts metric conversion. Daily Planet, Canada’s daily science news show on the Discovery Channel is owned by the same parent company as the G&M but sadly our hapless and innumerate intern is still stuck in the mm section of the style book. Last week the show reported a large aquarium as containing 3600 gallons. Perhaps they were uncertain as to whether these were Imperial or US gallons and couldn’t decide which of either 12,500 or 16,000 litres to use. Here’s a hint, try 15,000; it’s still a lot of water.