Your Letters
16:23 UK time, Tuesday, 5 September 2006
Re the alleged plan for Blair to appear on Blue Peter. If I recall correctly, the Blue Peter is hoisted immediately before setting sail to warn the rest of the crew to get back on board. Aspirant vexillologists () may wish to create alternative farewell messages.
Jel, Swansea
Now that you've heralded as Britain's Greatest unsung landmark, it isn't unsung any more. So what's Britain's new greatest unsung landmark?
Matt Folwell, Cambridge
Actually, Kelly in USA, Harvestmen are a type of spider. In England daddy long legs aren't spiders at all but crane flies - flying insects that have a three-part life cycle like a caterpillar - grub, larva, adult. Another difference in the English language on each side of the Atlantic.
Sarah, Brighton
Great stuff on the freesheets, PM. Nice to have a peek at the intrigue behind it all. Now I know why, when thelondonpaper isn't exactly shy about mentioning Sky, London Lite isn't so keen on mentioning the Standard. (As pointed out by .)
Anthony, London
It is only the extreme boredom of work that made me carry on reading this to the end. No more London-centric PMs please I think you'll find that there are regional pages within the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News website.
JFK, Sheffield
So "Monitor apologises over the London paper wars to all 'non-metropolitan' readers". Since when was London the only metropolis? The biggest city yes, the only one, no.
Simon Varwell, Glasgow
"" - oh come on! Are these kind of headlines made up just for monitor readers?
Mike, Nottingham
Jel's letter regarding statistics produced by the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Asian Network is unfair to those who produced the report. 500 is an adequate sample size. The population being sampled is young British Asians rather than the whole UK population, so Jel's 6 million figure is her own fantasy. I reckon these numbers tell us that we can be 95% sure that the real proportion is between 0.074 and 0.126, so Jel's random guess of a 1% chance of the report being right seems wrong too. I'm sure a real statistician will correct me if I'm wrong. I haven't done this for a while.
Phil, Guisborough
I have a problem with these "research has shown link between..."-type articles. The link might run the opposite way that researchers expect. For instance in generally autistic-spectrum disorders, mean some degree of social awkwardness, so, probably, it takes longer to get the hang of this dating lark, and, eventually, results in later fatherhood. I notice that the researchers didn't think of this! As an interesting exercise, next time you see one of these stories, try to think up an alternative reason for the link, with the cause and the effect reversed. It sheds a lot of much-needed light on academic research!
Candy Spillard, York, UK
"" is a composite noun phrase, and as such the plural ending "s" is at the end of the phrase, making gin and tonics. However, this depends entirely on how many you are talking about. In my experience it goes 1 gin and tonic, 2 gin and tonics, 3 gins and tonicses, 4 ginsntonics, 5 tinsanggonics, 6 ticongis.
Fiona, York
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