How the odds are made

Nobody counts how many people stepped in dog poop this morning. So the number is built, not looked up.

Your answers narrow the population. A live web search pulls real figures — population counts, ownership rates, weather, incident data. Those figures get multiplied together into a chain, and every line of that chain is printed with the source it came from.

The badge tells you how much to trust it. Sourced means most figures came from research. Estimated means it was reasoned from real anchors. Guesswork means the search came back empty and the arithmetic is doing all the work.

Precision is the joke. The assumptions are the honest part.