Barometer | 15 August 2019

Girls only

Polish village Miejsce Odrzanskie was reported not to have had a single boy born in the past decade, though 12 girls have been born in the same period. However, such an imbalance is far from a freak occurrence:
 
— Assuming a 50-50 chance of a baby being male or female, the probability of 12 girls born in succession is one in 4,096. Given that there are 10,000 parishes in Poland, you would expect at any one time for there to be two to three whose last dozen births were all female.
— There is an equal chance that 12 boys will be born in succession.
 

Powerless

A million British people were reported to have been left without electricity when a gas power station and wind farm both failed. How does that compare with people left without power in some of history’s biggest outages?