Tag: BBC

  • British Trident System

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    Brendan Barry
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    The United Kingdom is one of eight, probably nine nuclear powers. (Israel has never confirmed that it has tested/operates nuclear weapons.) Unlike most countries, the UK only uses one delivery system to operate its weapons: submarines using Trident ballistic missiles. The British Trident system became an issue in the coalition government. While it was supported…

  • Digging up a Dornier

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    Brendan Barry
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    Dornier was a German aircraft manufacturer active during World War II. One of their more interesting designs was the Do-17 bomber, nicknamed the Pencil Bomber because of its unusually thin fuselage. All surviving examples of the aircraft were thought destroyed until one was found on the floor of the English Channel. Yesterday the Royal Air…

  • England and Wales Census Results

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    Brendan Barry
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    Earlier this week, the Office of National Statistics in the United Kingdom released census results for England and Wales. (Northern Ireland and Scotland are reported separately.) England has more people than expected, most likely because of undercounting of immigrants, and Wales is now some three million and counting. There are fewer Christians than expected—and fewer…

  • The Enemy Amongst Us

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    Brendan Barry
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    Perhaps the greatest danger now facing NATO and US troops in Afghanistan is the age-old wolf in sheep’s clothing, the insurgent dressed in Afghan Army fatigues. As the graphic below shows, the number of fatalities has been increasing along with the number of attacks. The silver lining in the cloud (to mix metaphors) is that…

  • Who Has Won the Tour de France

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    Brendan Barry
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    Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France over the weekend; he is the first Briton to do so since the Tour began in 1903. (But to be more accurate, Wiggins was born to an Australian man and English mother in Belgium.) Naturally the BBC covered this topic in an infographic focusing on the nationality of…

  • How Fat Are You?

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    Brendan Barry
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    The BBC is letting you see how fat you are. They take inputs of age, weight, gender, and then your country of residence to compute your BMI and compare that across multiple countries for which the data exists. It compares you to your national average and then provides a country whose average best fits your…

  • Higgs Boson. You Can Call It God.

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    Brendan Barry
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    CERN may—or may not—have discovered a particle that may—or may not—be the Higgs Boson that would probably fill in a lot of the holes in our understanding of how the world may work at a sub-atomic level. That is a lot of ‘may’s. Understanding just what a Higgs Boson does is not quite so easy. In…

  • How Much Do You Work?

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    Brendan Barry
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    Have you ever wondered if you’re working too much? Thanks to an interactive infographic from the BBC, now you can see whether or not you are. At least in comparison to the rest of the OECD. The user enters an average number of hours worked per week and then their total number of holidays (including…

  • Battleground States

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    Brendan Barry
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    The BBC provides an interactive tool to explore the battleground states in the forthcoming election. A giant donut chart with 50 segments maps a segment to a state and its total number of electoral votes. The larger the electoral vote, e.g. California, the larger the segment. Beyond just a giant chart, however, the BBC has…

  • How the RMS Titanic Sank

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    Brendan Barry
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    On 14 April 1912—that is 100 years—RMS Titanic avoided slamming bow-on into an iceberg. But her turn allowed the iceberg to slice a long gash beneath the waterline and the North Atlantic gushed into watertight compartment after watertight compartment. Several hours later over 1500 people would be dead. The BBC has published several articles about…