Stat of the Week Competition Winner: September 14 – 20 2013
Thank you for your nominations in this week’s Stat of the Week Competition.
Two of the nominations were about arithmetic – percentage increase and closing speed calculations – and two were more interesting examples about coffee and beer drinking. Thomas had posted earlier about the coffee drinking example (although Dave Tattersfield added some more useful information to his nomination).
So, this week we’ve chosen Nick Iversen’s curious sample-size-of-one beer-drinking nomination to be our Stat of the Week:
Under limit after 13 beers in 2 hours
This statistic doesn’t ring true and defies common sense.
The article says that a police officer who drank 13 beers in two hours remained under the legal drink-driving limit of 80. That’s incredible and I don’t believe it.
If we consult the tables at http://www.moderation.org/bac/bac-men.shtml we see that if a heavy 109kg man drinks 12 beers then after 2 hours his BAC would be 148 or roughly twice the limit.
The story can only be true if the police officer is much heavier than 109kg (say twice that) or if the beer is low alcohol and in either case the story is dishonestly misleading.
There appears to be a photograph of the policer office in question back in 2010 here (second from the left).
Congratulations Nick and thanks for all the nominations!
What I’ve been able to find about research on variability in blood alcohol concentration between people suggests about a twofold range among people of the same weight and sex. If the tables give the middle of the range, you’d expect it to be very unusual to find someone at lower than 100 mcg when the table says 148 mcg.
Perhaps this officer is at a biological extreme, but the idea that you could be under the limit after 13 beers in 2 hours certainly wouldn’t generalise.
11 years ago