Numbers games

Imagine my surprise as I sipped my coffee and feasted on the morning news to find that a quarter of Australians are addicted to coffee and cannot function without it.
Hmmm ... sounds plausible I suppose until you read further. The survey was of a sample size of 552, of which 26% said they were addicted to coffee. All of these drank more than 3 cups of coffee a day. The "self-proclaimed addicts" said they could not "speak to anyone before they had their first caffeine hit in the morning" ... which must make their partners really happy! The report of the survey, conducted by the Home Beautiful magazine, did not outline the methodology employed, how the sample population was chosen, or give any other details which might suggest the findings will be reported in a scientific journal any time soon!
Also on numbers, and "how did they get that?" was another story in The Daily Telegraph today which told of a pensioner who celebrated her 100th birthday by lighting her 170,000th cigarette from a candle on her birthday cake. Now if only I knew what day World War I started in 1914 (when Winnie Langley was 7!), I could re-check the calculations* ... 5 cigarettes a day since then ... say 1 July 1914 (midpoint in year) to 28 August 2008 is 34,000 days is ... (drumroll) 170,020 cigarettes. Close enough but depending on the actual date, they may have rounded up or down to get to the round figure. More research is needed ... but how amazing would it be to smoke no more and no fewer than 5 cigarettes a day. Of course, it's not such a big health risk, she insisted, because she never inhaled ... cigarette smoke ... as opposed to the rather bold headline on the article which proclaimed "100 year-old never inhaled".
*According to Wikipedia, World War I started on 28 July 1914. So even if she started smoking on that day, and smoked 5 cigarettes a day, that would take it to 169,885 cigarettes smoked in her lifetime (so far). But as she started smoking a few days after the way started she would also fall just short of this mark. (Thanks to Palm's Personal Power One calculator which makes it so easy to work out the number of days between two dates!) (I know ... too much time on my hands.)
And finally, on the subject of choice, in a recent newspaper debate over whether TV shows are objectionable ("too sexy, violent") a reader comments "If families don't like this sort of show, then they should turn off turn the TV off or change channels. This is why there are several free-to-air and pay TV stations: to allow viewers to watch what they like." Hmmm, perhaps not - surely the companies who are running the stations are actually looking to make money out of the exercise, with different offerings a way of catching a greater audience, rather than their way of simply increasing the options open to viewers. The plethora of reality shows spanning so many channels attests to that.