Where do they get these people from?
After they’ve processed all possible medical indicators, they replace
everything – almost tenderly – then sew the wound up with the care a
surgeon might give to a living patient. I’d expected gallows humour,
but mostly they worked with quiet precision – two or three white-coated
pathologists to a table, reading numbers from electronic scales to each
other: "Heart, 260 milligrams."
A heart? 260 milligrammes (to use the English spelling, or at least my version of it).
The man’s heart weighed almost 500mg, way above the average 240mg-360mg.
Milligrammes?
The man’s out by three orders of magnitude. Think about it for a minute, a bag of sugar or flour is a kilo. So that’s 1,000 (yes, one thousand) grammes. Just off the top of your head you’d think, oooh, a human heart, maybe one per bag of sugar? Ten perhaps? You know, there’s not that many of us who know our anatomy all that well, long time since people regularly saw offal like cow and pig’s hearts as part of the diet.
But to think that there might be 4,000 human hearts to one bag of sugar? Yes, really, four thousand!
There’s one thousand milligrammes to one gramme and one thousand grammes to a kilo. So 260 milligrammes per heart makes four hearts per gramme (about the size of a few grains of sugar then) and ….well, you get the picture.
There’s been at least three people who have gone through this piece. The writer, Stephen Armstrong. The editor, whoever that was for this particular piece. And the proof reader or sub editor (yes, contrary to the stories about The Grauniad they do actually employ them). There may well have been more.
Are they all actually innumerate? And people shout at blogs for being inaccurate?
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