Lefties are fighters, the Washington Post reported today. In a story about the difference between left- and right-handed people, the Post said that countries with high homicide rates have a higher percentage of left-handed people. But you have to take their word for it:
For example, among the Eipo people in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, where the homicide rate is 3 per 1,000 people per year, 20 percent of people are left-handed. Among the Dioula people of Burkina Faso, where the homicide rate is 0.01, 3 percent are left-handed.
The graf completely flummoxed me. I had to stop and try to calculate in my head what a rate of 0.01 means in terms of 1,000 people, so I could compare it to the first rate given. Why didn’t the reporter or editor do this work for me? Why do they have to present figures that are obviously meant to be compared in such a way as to make the comparison almost impossible?
I don’t know. What I do know is this: I stopped reading the story.
