This is a map from the Chief Medical Officer’s forthcoming annual report (which I’m editing), currently on display at the British Library as part of their excellent Beautiful Science exhibition. There’s also a copy of the last annual report beneath the map, ready to be exchanged for the new one when it is published. The exhibition opens tomorrow (though I was lucky enough to get to see it a day early), and runs until 26th May.

I first read this book in 2008, not all that long after it was released, pretty much in one go on a long haul flight. I recently came across it again, remembered the pleasure I derived from it the first time round, and so gave it a re-read.

The Tiger That Isn’t provides a competent grounding in the very basics of statistical theory – risk, sampling, averages, etc – but does so in a way that is both relevant to daily life and, genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny. Blastland and Dilnot pick examples from many different spheres of life, but with a particular lean towards politics and the media, and explain the basic statistical errors underlying fallacious claims. They largely succeed in doing this in a lighthearted way, and attempt to equip readers with tools which might help them avoid similar mistakes in future.

One suggestion that I remembered from my first reading of this book is that any Government spending announcement is more easily interpreted if one divides the headline figure by 3bn, which gives an approximation of the spend per member of the population per week.

Of course, this book does not discuss statistical methods in great detail, and nor does it deal with some of the more complex statistical concepts. It does, however, give a good grounding in everyday statistics to those with a passing interest – I wish more journalists (and politicians) would give themselves a solid foundation of statistical understanding, and this is as good a place to start as any.

I very much enjoyed my re-read of this volume, and would happily recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the topic.

The Tiger That Isn’t is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

This notice is carved into St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey, an Anglican church in London. The name of the Rector dates it to the 1860s or thereabouts (though it did strike me as somewhat short-sighted to carve the name of the Rector into the very fabric of the building… surely they knew he wouldn’t be around forever? It’s been out of date for well over a century now!)

This sign intrigued me; I’m not embarrassed to confess that my ecclesiastical knowledge didn’t extend to understanding the word “churchings”. It turns out that a “churching” was a Church of England service for women who had recently given birth, thanking God for “the safe deliverance and preservation from the great dangers of childbirth”. It is no longer practised – presumably, people prefer to thank hygiene and medicine rather than God nowadays.

In the late 1800s, childbirth was a dangerous business in England: about 1 in 200 births ended in the mother’s death. These days, the figure is many, many times smaller: about 1 in 10,000. Yet, unbelievably, there are some countries, like Somalia, Nigeria, Sudan, and Sierra Leone, where mothers giving birth today face a higher risk of death than those in England in the late 1800s. I wonder if they still practice “churchings”.

House of Cards is the best thing on TV since The Killing, and series 2 – at least judging from the nine episodes I’ve seen so far – is even better than series 1.

It’s so simple, Sainsbury’s needs a whole other leaflet to list the terms and conditions…!

Wendy bought me these toasty new slippers for Valentine’s Day!

Earlier today, I wrote about the debates Wendy and I had when merging our book collection, and mentioned that Wendy likes to keep copies of different editions of the same book, and – in some cases – duplicates of the same edition of the same book. This picture sort of illustrates the point… though I know we have at least two other editions of the Oxford Handbook (5th and 8th) and more BNFs around the place than I could lay my hands on for this photo…!

Over the 3,783 days I’ve known Wendy, we’ve rarely argued. Yet, I vividly remember that the merging of our respective book collections caused some disagreement.

Fiction and general reference book were fine – we had few duplicates, and only really disagreed on whether it was necessary to have several different dictionaries. The Oxford, Penguin and Collins watching me write this remind me that I acquiesced.

When it came to medical books, however, our approaches differed more wildly. I was all for ridding ourselves of duplicates; Wendy was not. Indeed, Wendy was not only reluctant to rid herself of duplicates in our combined collection, but even had duplicates within her own collection: she felt rather strongly that old editions of books should be retained alongside their newer counterparts.

In the end, as with most things in life, we compromised… though made the mistake of compromising on a set that filled our shelves, which means we have to regularly re-compromise as we acquire new volumes.

I was, therefore, amused to read Anne Fadiman’s article on the Book Keeping blog, in which she describes the intimate yet painful process of marrying her own (non-medical) library with that of her husband. This passage in particular made me laugh out loud:

A particularly bad moment occurred while he was in the process of transferring my Shakespeare collection from one bookcase to another and I called out, “Be sure to keep the plays in chronological order!”

“You mean we’re going to be chronological within each author?” he gasped. “But no one even knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!”

“Well,” I blustered, “we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The Tempest. I’d like to see that reflected in our shelves.”

George says that was one of the few times he has seriously contemplated divorce.

It is an absolutely brilliant read, and well worth a few minutes of your time this weekend.

The picture at the top of this post was posted on Flickr by Alexandre Duret-Lutz, and was used under its Creative Commons licence.

I think it was Mark Twain who described golf as a good walk spoiled (I think an English writer would have said “spoilt”, but I know I’ll disappear down the internet mine shaft of interesting facts for the rest of the evening should I try to look that up). Either way, this golf course is near home, and I don’t play golf so have never ventured upon it.

I’m spending so many hours a day staring at this at the moment that I think I’m in danger of getting square eyes!