Brexit, the barman and the boiled egg
A man goes into a bar and orders a pint of beer, a large red wine, a brandy, a gin and tonic, a vodka and orange, and a whisky, which he then proceeds to drink. “Crikey,” says the barman, “that’s quite an order.” Another man comes up to the bar, and orders ten times what the first man is drinking. “Now that,” says the barman, “is an order of magnitude.” Okay, so it’s an old joke, but the maths jokes are always the best ones. And it does illustrate a point: that even terms which seem a bit woolly sounding do actually, in scientific terms, have very precise meanings.
