Hacker News Reader

Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

I was reading a book about nutrition recently and the author was relating the remarkable health benefits of herbs, even dried ones. She went on to state that were you to eat an entire cup of dried basil - not that you would - you’d get 2,113 grams of calcium. Yes that’s right, 2 kg of minerals in a fluffy cup of dried basil flakes! A miracle of nutrition indeed.

View on HN

  > you’d get 2,113 grams of calcium

Perhaps the author was using the comma as the decimal separator? I know that the Norwegians do this.

2,113 grams seems totally reasonable.

With too many significant digits though.

I wouldn't expect a non-engineering journalist to understand or care about sig figs, nor does it matter

Most countries/languages use a comma as the decimal separator - it's the English-speaking world that's unusual for using a dot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...

The map you linked suggests that dots are standard in both China and India as well, which probably means that the majority of humans and economic energy use dots not commas.

I assume any translation service would account for this.

As far as I know, commas as the decimal separator aren't used anywhere in the English world. Although, perhaps the author was not a native speaker, but still personally writing in English and made the mistake.

That's a lot of sig-figs.

Reminds me of a factoid that claimed spinach was 80% protein or some absurd number like that. Turned out that 80% of the calories you get from spinach come from protein, but of course 80% of a tiny number remains a tiny number.

Assuming < 2 KG of basil went in I'm pretty curious about the transmutation effect here. Surely some scientist has looked into this.

By my math it should be roughly 1.6 grams of calcium in a cup of dried basil. I was curious for some reason and had to check

I'm getting off topic here, but I just checked and 1 US cup of basil is around 20 grams - I regularly make a pesto that has around 25g per serving!

Mind, that's for fresh basil and you mentioned dried, I don't know how to convert those weights.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com