You'll get up, you'll choose what to eat, whether to go for a run, whether or not to indulge in a glass of wine or a second helping of dessert. You're constantly making decisions based on what you want versus what you think is good for you. And how do you know what's good for you? Because somebody told you so. On average, we are given different pieces of advice every week, from sensible government guidelines to scare stories about what gives us cancer.
Actually, that's not strictly true: I found that statistic on the internet, but it rather proves the point that you can assign a number to just about anything. Numbers work because they get our attention, but they're also fairly easy to manipulate.
Here's the latest thinking about the science behind the numbers that govern our lives. Health messages tend to work if they capture the public's imagination.
There's a mixture of art and science in setting them at the right level, between what's ideal and what's pragmatic. And so it was with the five-a-day campaign, which began in But in the countries where the WHO had found the lowest levels of heart disease and cancers linked to diet, the average person was eating far more fruit and veg — around 10 portions a day — and other countries recommend greater amounts: in Denmark, it's g; in Greece, it's six portions of vegetables and three of fruit.
So although five will do you good, more might be better. It's estimated that most people in the UK still average only three portions. However, there has been a huge growth in another area, thanks to the five-a-day message: the processed food industry. If you eat more portions of processed fruit and veg, you're also likely to be eating a lot more salt, sugar and saturated fat.
Herbert's Cinderella analogy may raise a few eyebrows, but she's certainly not the only expert keen to tell women who want to be mothers to get on with it. Oster became interested in the so-called fertility cliff when researching her book Expecting Better , which tackles the data behind some of the most common and controversial pregnancy advice.
She found that the main research on fertility rates comes from data collected in the 19th century, based on the age of women at the time of their marriage. The theory being that "couples would pretty much get down to business right after the wedding… Researchers found the chance of having any children was very similar for women who got married at any age between 20 and Perhaps that clock isn't going to chime 12 quite as soon as you think.
The claim that we should drink eight glasses of water a day is widely attributed to a report from , from the American National Academy of Sciences' Food and Nutrition board, which estimated we needed one millilitre of water for every calorie of food.
About ml comes from food eaten each day. The eight glasses idea might seem fairly harmless, but it has fed into the belief that we should all be drinking more water, that it is healthy to be proactive about "staying ahead of our thirst".
It's an idea that is now widely promoted in sport, but as Noakes details in his book Waterlogged: The Serious Problem Of Overhydration In Endurance Sports , even athletes weren't really encouraged to take on more fluids while training until the late 70s.
There are two ways of displaying fractional values in mathematics. When dealing with a decimal place we can use the same columns as we do when dealing with whole numbers integers ; we simply continue the columns to the right, as each number is smaller than the one before. So Minus 1. For example, 3. If a 0 occurs before the end of the number then this must be kept, so 5.
In maths we call any kind of calculation an operation. Fractions are written in this way. Similarly, an addition operation involves adding numbers together and a subtraction operation involves taking one number away from another. Actually, what we mean is that we are doing some maths calculations. Roman numerals are still used in some disciplines but most commonly to count or show numbers of years. We often also see them on clock faces.
Most word-processors allow users to number pages in Roman numerals, and this is commonly used in books for supplementary pages such as appendices. Usually Roman numerals are written in order largest symbol first but there is no universal standard. Tally systems are still used commonly today for simple counting, and can be helpful when, for example, something has to be counted quickly. An example could be counting garden birds over a ten-minute period. There are numerous different birds that you may see during this period and it may prove difficult to remember how many of each has been spotted.
To organize your data and identify trends, you can add filters, group data into categories, create pivot tables, and more. Enter text and numbers in tables. Illustrate your data with a 2D, 3D, or interactive chart. When you make changes to the data in the table, the chart updates automatically. Add a chart. It comes indirectly from my work on languages in the Amazon. In the book, you talk at length about how our fascination with our hands—and five fingers on each—probably helped us invent numbers and from there we could use numbers to make other discoveries.
So what came first—the numbers or the math? There are obviously patterns in nature. There are lots of patterns in nature, like pi, that are actually there. These things are there regardless of whether or not we can consistently discriminate them. When we have numbers we can consistently discriminate them, and that allows us to find fascinating and useful patterns of nature that we would never be able to pick up on otherwise, without precision.
Numbers are this really simple invention. These words that reify concepts are a cognitive tool. Without them we seem to struggle differentiating seven from eight consistently; with them we can send someone to the moon. A lot of people think because math is so elaborate, and there are numbers that exist, they think these things are something you come to recognize. Another interesting parallel is the connection between numbers and agriculture and trade. What came first there?
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