{"id":372,"date":"2007-04-10T21:52:04","date_gmt":"2007-04-10T11:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2007\/04\/10\/the-heralds-dam-in-distress-sell\/"},"modified":"2007-10-07T19:52:29","modified_gmt":"2007-10-07T09:52:29","slug":"the-heralds-dam-in-distress-sell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2007\/04\/10\/the-heralds-dam-in-distress-sell\/","title":{"rendered":"The Herald’s Dam-In-Distress-Sell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s start with a little challenge.<\/p>\n

The following graphic was taken from today’s Sydney Morning Herald<\/a>. I scanned it because I was unable to find it online.<\/p>\n

It shows the sorry state of the reservoirs feeding drinking water to Sydney. I have chopped out the actual percentage.<\/p>\n

The challenge is for you to guess, based on the arrow and graphic, what percentage the current water levels are at.<\/p>\n

Dam Levels Graphic in SMH<\/p>\n

\n

Now, far be it from me to suggest that the Sydney Morning Herald is in any way biased, but if it was<\/em> to be biased… well let’s just say they endorsed the Opposition<\/a> before the recent elections – that is, the party that isn’t<\/em> the ones who they are blaming for NSW infrastructure problems.<\/p>\n

And, far be it from me to to suggest that sensationalising the risk of a water crisis in NSW would be a great way to sell more newspapers. I am sure the Sydney Morning Herald, paper of record, wouldn’t stoop so low.<\/p>\n

\n

So how did you go?<\/p>\n

If you suggested that the number would be about 23-25%, you did very well. According to my measurements, that is about the level that the graphic indicates.<\/p>\n

So what is the real number? The number that they sourced from the Sydney Catchment Authority<\/a>?<\/p>\n

38.3%<\/p>\n

That’s about 60% bigger than the figure the graphic would indicate.<\/p>\n

With 50mm of rain in Sydney in the past week (but not sure how much in the catchment area), I would be betting that tomorrow’s figures show a further increase.<\/p>\n

You can do better, Granny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A quick look at the Sydney dam levels, as illustrated by the Sydney Morning Herald.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,24,21],"tags":[92,61],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-cathartic-rant","category-observation","tag-journalism","tag-maths"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}