"Lies, damn lies, and statistics" - British PM, B. Disreali (popularised by Mark Twain, and often attributed to him, in a fabulous example of disinformation)

Today is "Brexit Day". For those of you not in the UK or Europe, this might not mean much. Nine months ago we held a referendum to leave the EU, we votes leave, by a significant but narrow margin. Lots of people are pissed off by this - I'm not one of them.

But whether we stay or go isn't what I want to talk about, what I want to talk about is the reliance on polling data, and the idea we can tell who voted for what.

Lots of statistics say it was the young who voted to stay, and the over 65s who votes to leave (and this is called unfair, because apparently the older generations won't have to life in a separated Britain - as though the average lifespan now isn't 87 or something...). I've also read so-called statistics about what percentages of blacks/Mexicans/women voted for Trump. On both these things, I called bollocks.

Our votes are private and confidential. At best, all we can say is who voted where. Everything else is guess work. All this data is created from small samplings of the people who chose to talk to to the information gatherers outside polling stations, and who says they're telling the truth? No one can check. And since voting for Brexit, like voting conservative, isn't socially popular, plenty of people will deny they did it, even if they did.

I hate that news outlets publish this data as fact, use it to openly bully certain categories of people in the country. It's bad maths.

Right, now that's out of the way, I'm going to go make a cake.