Two Passages (or) Do You Like My Posts This Way?

"What generally matters is not whether a number is right or wrong, they are often wrong, but whether numbers are so wrong as to be misleading. It is standard practice among statisticians to say how wrong they think their numbers might be, though we might not even know in which direction - whether too high or too low. Putting an estimate on the potential size of the error, which is customarily done by saying how big the range of estimates need to be before we can be 95 per cent sure it covers the right answer (known as a confidence interval),  is the best we can do by way of practical precaution against the number being bad. Though even with a confidence interval of 95 per cent there is still a 5 per cent chance of being wrong. This is a kind of modesty the media often ignore. The news often doesn't have time, or think it important, to tell you that there was a wide range of plausible estimates and that this was just one, from somewhere near the middle. So we don't know, half the time, whether the number is the kind to miss a barn door, enjoying no one's confidence, or if it is a number strongly believed to hit the mark."

(Page 94  of "The Tiger That Wasn't by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot)

"Silent reading is, although no one is quite sure, a relatively late arrival historically. The Venerable Bede was regarded as prodigious in the seventh century in that he could read without moving his lips and was therefore reading faster than he could speak. What Bede had worked out, evidently, was the amazing buffering capacity of the brain: that it can take in verbiage fast and play it back to the mind's ear at the right, slowed-down speed. Larger 'eyebites' and various other 'speed reading' gimmicks were promulgated in the speed reading mania of the 1960s- when information overload first became a worry. Unfortunately, there are absolute physical limits to the rate at which one can read. Few will reach them, but no human eye will exceed them, any more than any athlete- however will trained and drugged- will run 200 metres in three seconds.

Nowadays, it seems to me, something like the 'surf and zap' approach is required. As with satellite TV and its hundreds of channels, one has to skim through, stop where it seems interesting,  zap the commercials and other impertinent material, concentrate from time to time where the offering seems genuinely interesting."

(Page 42 of "How To Read a Novel" by John Sutherland)