From The Daily Mail:
World’s largest container ship at 396m long arrives in Britain on maiden call carrying thousands of Christmas presents
•Marco Polo, the new giant of the waves, is five times bigger than an Airbus A380 or the size of four football pitches
•Can carry more than 16,000 containers on board.
Surely there are probably "thousands" of Xmas presents in each individual container? So shouldn't that be "millions of Xmas presents"?? Or possibly even "billions of Xmas presents", if the things are small enough.
Monday 10 December 2012
"Thousands"????
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13 comments:
I'm sure a container can hold a thousand Christmas presents, but are you sure that one thousand of the containers do?
JJ, just about everything in those containers is a potential Xmas present, isn't it?
TV's, Hi-Fis, computers, bed linen, toys, cutlery, I can imagine people buying any of these for other people (or themselves) as Xmas presents.
It might be just 16,000 big 'main ' presents.
I mean, once again I've asked Santa for an Abrams M1-A Tank , so fingers crossed
Well, if you count the containers on board in the pictures, there are not more than 3000, so 16000 would mean that they were stacked 33 high. Also the DM claims that she's 51 times as long as the Queen Mary 2, which makes her 17km long. The mistake about the number of presents is all part of a rich feast of innumeracy.
PC, and how is poor old Santa going to get that down the chimney? Don't be too surprised if you don't get one. Or would you like him to smash straight through the wall and park it in your living room?
B, yes, the "51 times as long" statistic puzzled me too, but I couldn't be bothered Googling it.
M, On one of the later pictures the claim changes to 51m longer than QM2
@Mark , he could leave it in Parliament Square as that's where it would be going and save me the drive up the Old Kent Road
Ch, that seems at least plausible.
PC, I once saw a tank drive up Strand (going away from Parliament Sq) I think it was to do with Fathers 4 Justice (apparently a lot of tanks are road legal). Was pretty cool, although heading in wrong direction.
Interesting that she's UK-flagged (parent company is French-owned). Wonder if piracy concerns have put ship owners off adopting flags-of-convenience from countries with no ability to offer naval protection?
"Interesting that she's UK-flagged (parent company is French-owned)."
Especially since the French have a perfectly good navy.
JB, B, agreed.
But we already have "land value tax" for ships, it's called the "tonnage tax" (several European countires have it) and basically, what you are paying for is insurance (i.e. flying a British flag and getting protection of Royal Navy).
In this case, presumably, the UK was better value than France.
Indeed. Obviously my comment was intended to imply "UK rather than Panama due to Navy", not "UK rather than France due to Navy".
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