UKH

Interesting mistake, surely, on the BBC News website today: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-65613260, where it says Snowdon is “the highest point in Britain until you get to Scotland's Ben Nevis, 260 miles (418km) away as the crow flies.” Surely to the south the Mamores and all the big Munros south of Glencoe, Ben Lui etc, get in the way?

It also says "The remoteness of Yr Wyddfa, or Snowdon as it is also known, surely makes it one of the most pristine environments in the land."

I make it under 2 miles from an A road and less than 4 from a major town. Not convinced geography is Natalie Grice's thing.

'Pristine environment'? Ha ha ha...

I guess NG has never been there.

The article conflates 2 separate issues

1) should people take single use plastic products with them? (wherever they choose to go). Lively debate for that one

2) Why do so many **** heads leave litter? increasingly so it seems

Conflating in the single use plastic problem (a worthy topic in itself) with national parks litter is unhelpful. For example "brown bunting" (used loo roll lying about) is biodegradable but still a serious problem. I think there'd be better progress  tackling them as separate issues 

Maybe if you took a ruler and laid it on a map between the two summits? By some geographical oddity, the line may cut over bealachs and shoulders and not pass over anything higher than Yr Wyddfa. I'd go and get my road atlas out of the car if I wasn't having a cup of tea or could be @rsed.

I just tried it on some digital mapping.

A straight line from Snowdon to the Ben doesn't cut anything higher than snowdon. However it goes close to plenty of summits that are.

Technically then, the BBC are correct.

They are indeed as the crow flies.

I'd add an elevation chart if I was a supporting member

Out of interest what higher hills would the crow be passing on its straight and level flight?

Roughly

4 1/2 km west of Beinn Lui

14km east of Ben Cruachan

4 1/2 east of the Bidean Massif

4km west of Binnein Mor

1/2km east of Sgurr a'Mhaim

I need to get out more.

Problem is to a born and bred city slicker, whose holidays usually consist of flying to another city etc.. most uk hills are remote wild environments. Where as we know they are littered with the impacted of humans and never far from civilisation.  

Got my OS maps out and it looks like he had a few close passes and overflights - Stob Gabhar might have been a close shave

It's still a rather stupid statement, you could draw a line to a whole lot of other hills and it probably would pass over a higher one!

Ah, but what if you went the other way?

Logically the line needs to start in London.

I disagree.  They say:

“the highest point in Britain until you get to Scotland's Ben Nevis, 260 miles (418km) away as the crow flies”

The “crow flies” comment comes after a comma.  That changes everything. The requirement is “until you get to […] Ben Nevis”.  For me that defines a search radius for a circular area in which Snowdon is the highest mountains. What comes after the comma (“as the crow flies”) defines that radius.  There’s no cue in the text that they’re specifically talking about mountains under a single point-to-point line.

But then I doubt the journo really thought about what technically they actually meant to convey with their words…

Just be grateful they wrote something and didn't just publish a list of crap that people who were once on a reality TV show said about it on twitter, like every other BBC article of the last decade.

I'm completely convinced. BBC Verify is obviously a huge waste of TV licence money. For anyone who thinks this is pedantry please consider the meaning of these two ALMOST identical sentences:

1) Pardon, impossible to be executed.

2) Pardon impossible, to be executed.

Sloppy punctuation can cost lives!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/55077304 , I sent them some feedback.

I always preferred the example "I was helping my uncle, Jack, off his horse"

Taken from the English language National Curriculum?

Maybe the BBC journalist concerned has problems with the Gaelic. I' ve sent her a list of the hills south of Ben Nevis with the appropriate pronunciations.

Best solution for a plastic freedom Snowdon is remove the cafe and railway. They take 10,000 litres of water up daily, powered I presume by coal or diesel, but want to help the environment by reducing plastic on the hill by a few kilos! 

"The vicar wore no clothes, to distinguish himself from his congregation."

Was in our comprehension book when I was about 10.  An image I never forgot and made me laugh out loud in class.

Yes; the obvious intent was a W-E line sweeping north from Snowdon (sorry, Yr Wyddfa).

So clearly wrong, since that sweeps up many peaks higher than Snowdon.

Only works if the map projection turns great circles into straight lines. I think this means the earth's surface has to be projected from the centre of the earth on to a plane.

BBC verify seems an extremely worthwhile thing to me in countering dangerous misinformation and helping to maintain trust in the BBC. It has far more important things to focus on than, though admittedly unfortunate, pretty trivial things such as this.

I think if you were a crow and you flew into an unexpected mountain, you'd think differently.

Disagree.  If a source wants to be taken seriously as a trust based source of truth, it can’t afford to pick and choose when it publishes falsehoods.   

You can’t fix this with top down corrections (BBCv) only - it needs a cultural shift where people at every level sense check and fact check content, and it’s that process that needs to be developed.  If it was there, easily checked falsehoods like the one in this thread wouldn’t get through.  That they do is a massive red flag - if something that can be trivially shown to be wrong - like this - gets through, what hope for complex issues?

BBC Verify have a chance to act on this and drive cultural improvement in the same people who will also publish “important” news.

I do, of course, agree that the BBC should be getting its facts right even with these sort of trivia and that it reflects badly on them when they don't (as evidenced in this thread). I just think it is more important that they are seen as transparently making it their priority to get the really serious stuff right (which I am sure they are).

Last time I watched a crow fly, it didn't fly in a particularly straight line.

Crows are also pretty territorial and not noted for flying long distances

It’s not just how it reflects on them though - it’s about treating the cause as well as stemming the obvious symptoms.  There’s no point if they don’t fix the root issue as exposed by this as much as anything “important”.

I explode in rage listening to Jeremy Vine weekly, their accuracy on many things is appalling and often the self proclaimed expert they bring in isn't really that knowledgeable or overly biased too. 

Have you recorded a statistically significant number of flights to back up your statement? I'm currently sitting in a field with lots of cows. The vast majority are up on their feet. It's not raining so this backs up the old saying.

African or European?

The BBC can get things spectacularly wrong. When this story was first published on their website

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-63800879.amp

it referred to new ‘elements’ rather than ‘minerals’. It was updated not long after I emailed to suggest a correction.

That statement is obviously inaccurate as you haven't actually exploded even the once, let alone on a weekly basis as you falsely claim... 😡💣

Gairloch crows - mainly hoodies!

😀

That maybe a fair point, to establish who is correct I'll appoint a committee, I'll select the chair and decide who sits on it. Likely reporting time 3-5 years, plus I'll decide what texts and WhatsApp messages are relevant to said enquiry. 

Absolutely right. I have written to the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY asking them to immediately and forthwith and permanently change the saying from "as the crow flies" to "as the crow would fly if it flew in straight lines"

How dare they

... for a given definition of 'straight lines'.

Well, the obvious answer is to test fly crows and bees over set distances to see which of them sets the benchmark in straight lines. I'm sure funding would be readily available to clear this up once and for all.

My money would be on kingfishers flying the straightest. Plenty of other birds faff around, circling and wotnot. Also, kingfishers stay low, thus avoiding wind and turbulence. They also look like they would, being a bit pointy shaped. 

Although the well known phrase ‘as straight as a sparrow’ suggests a sparrow flies even more straight. 

You may have something with kingfishers. But could one be persuaded to fly  from Snowdon to the Ben?

But since the earth is a globe, wouldn‘t a truly straight line between two elevated points on its surface appear to sag in the middle to an observer at sea level? Can (or should) Kingfishers compensate for this?

A kingfisher or a mountain kingfisher? 

You could easily buy one off with one old mouldy mackerel. They (kingfishers, not mackerel) are cheap

I'm sorry to tell you that phrase refers to the sexual orientation of sparrows

I hate beating about the bush

A couple of us from this forum saw the very rare Belted Kingfisher, that had flown across the Atlantic from Canada or similar all the way to near The Tickled Trout *, so yes. 

* although given the farmer was charging a tenner per person to view this bird, sometimes 100 birders a day, for over 3 months , I did wonder whether he’d bought a tame one from EBay for £3.60. 

Kingfishers could burrow through the earths crust, ensuring straightness in every dimension. 

Perhaps with a quick pit stop at the, wait for it, KinfishersHouse !!

There is a management story I’ve heard many times about an airline CEO stating the importance of cleaning the seat back tables. Customers faced with coffee stains when they drop down the table should rightly be concerned about other areas of the airline’s processes, like the quality of engine maintenance, say.

so I agree that sloppy reporting has a detrimental effect on trust in the brand.

The writer of the piece, Natalie Grace,has now amended the article. I emailed her about it and she got back to me a few days later to tell me she had done this.