CANNABIS CASUALTIES, HYBRID CARS, AND CUBIC LITRES

There are no difficult ideas in this column. Like, for example,
when I tell you about the Daily Telegraph front page headline which
says "Abuse of cannabis puts 500 a week in hospital", and it turns out
they're actually quoting a figure from a report on the number of
people having contact with any drug treatment service of any variety.
The colossal majority of these, of course, are outpatient appointments
for drugs counselling, not hospital admissions. So there are not 500
people a week suddenly being put into hospital by cannabis. But this
is not a news story: like their recurring dodgy abortion figures, it
is the venal moralising of a passing puritan, dressed up in posh numbers.

Similarly, there's nothing very complicated about a report from CNW
Marketing in Oregon, which the Independent's motoring correspondent
has now quoted twice in his attempt to demonstrate that Hummers,
Jeeps, and various other cars the size of a small caravan are - "in
fact" - greener than smaller hybrid cars like the Prius (because
readers love a quirky paradox).

CNW, a car industry marketing firm, manage to do this by making
calculations over the lifetime of a car. They decide that about 90% of
the environmental cost of a car's lifetime environmental impact is
from its manufacture and recycling, not the fuel it burns whilst
tootling around. This is the polar opposite of all other life-cycle
analyses. CNW include all kinds of funny things to make their numbers
work, like the erosion of the road surface of the people who travel to
the car factory.

They also decide, for the purposes of their calculation, that people
will keep their giant, cyclist-killing Jeeps for twice as long as
their green hybrid cars, and if you think that is a leap of faith,
they also decide that Prius drivers will travel about half as many
miles a year as Jeep drivers.

This may be true if you observe the behaviour of people who choose to
buy these cars. But it's hard to see how it is a factor for anyone
making a new purchasing decision, since you're probably going to drive
as much as you're going to drive, and buying a 4x4 is not suddenly
going to turn you overnight into a chubby, middle-class parent driving
your children 400 yards to school. Although for those of us afflicted
with a disproportionate anality, the most infuriating thing about this
report is the contrast between its opaque methodology and its
spurious, four-figure accuracy. They confidently assert that your
Hummer will last "34.96 years", which is almost as irritating as this
paper slipping into bogusly accurate currency conversions for
estimated figures, like last week's "$56bn (UKP28.26bn) international
food supplement industry".

I know I'm wrong to care. On the BBC news site "crews were hopeful the
20m cubic litres of water could be held back and not breach the dam
wall". And that'll be a struggle, since "cubic litres" are a
nine-dimensional measuring system, so the hyperdimensional water could
breach the dam in almost any one of the five other dimensions you
haven't noticed yet.

In the Metro they reckon "solving problems is really down to keeping
an open mind. Brain scans showed that volunteers who hit a mental
block during verbal tests gave off strong gamma rays, which are linked
with being focused and alert."

Gamma rays are produced by sub-atomic particle interactions, like
electron-positron annihilation or radioactive decay. They will
sterilise your brain very nicely, before the dead, irradiated neurons
start to grow over with scar tissue, and that may well affect
concentration.

And meanwhile, in Elle magazine they're promoting the scientific
theories of yet another self-declared nutritional genius: "Marisa
cited flour and water as the two biggest problem foods. She gave us
flour and water and urged us to make a gloopy paste, with which we
stuck pieces of paper to the wall. Then she said this is what's stuck
to our insides when we eat pasta and bread."

They only do it to wind you up. If you close your eyes, it'll all go
away again.