Nobody can do Math

[Ulu]

I am amazed at how well educated people in prominent positions of public trust can be so ignorant.

 

I’m not trying to be political or point fingers here because I see this from every side.

 

I was watching an old clip about a political candidate, and they claimed that he spent $500 million (!) just to lose in the primary election.

 

Now the anchorman speaking did not write his report, but you would think that as he read it an error would occur to him,  and it did not. Clearly these folks don’t think about what they’re reading on Camera.

 

Nor did his cohost show the reaction that any mathematician would, when this well-tailored Ivy League looking fellow declared that, “. . . there’s only 330 million people in the whole country! He should’ve just given every citizen a million dollars!”

 

They thought this was a terrific joke, as of course you cannot simply buy everybody’s vote; but, no one noticed the gaping mathematical error.

 

He could’ve really given every person in the country about a buck and a half, from his expenditure.

 

Anyhow the story about the 75 mm drill bit reminded me of this fact.

 

See, one of the things they drill into your brain as an engineer is that you always check those decimal points over like they are your own children. (The other thing is to account for every load.) Otherwise it’s enormously easy to make errors that are off by an order of magnitude.

 

People are just not very good at numbers once they get above $100.
 

But in the slide rule days where we didn’t have a calculator to place the decimal point, you always had to be thinking about this. Here in the computer age, nobody has to think about where the decimal point needs to go. Nobody bothers to think (is it reasonable?) about the answer.

 

Unless of course you’re the person spending $500 million.   I bet he thought long and hard about that.
 

<Edit:> By the way, my wife is retired schoolteacher. She has a masters degree in education from California State University, and she fell for this one too.

Edited August 24, 2020 by Ulu

[T120]

Brought to mind the flight of Air Canada 143 known as the  "Gimli Glider". The event due in part to some confusion with the conversion to metric here in Canada at the time.A summary of the event on Wikipedia as well as a simulation of the flight on youtube. So important to have good mathematical skills and a clear head.Fortunately there were no fatalities..

Edited August 24, 2020 by T120

[linus6948]

George Carlin explained it best over 30yrs ago, unfortunately it`s only gotten even worse since then.

 

 

 

[Bobacuda]

Ma and Pa Kettle were good at math...

https://youtu.be/4yO3oRLY5zA

[RobertKB]

25 = phone app X 1.  Math is easy!

 

I can usually do math in my head faster than most young people with a phone or calculator. They often ask how did you do that and I explain that when I went to school (I'm 71) you did math in your head or on paper. We had no cell phones, computers, calculators etc.  They say WTF????

[greg g]

My favorite quote about govt sending paraphrased as I don't remember it exactly or who said it.  " A billion here, a couple billion there, pretty soon we will be talking of spending big money...

 

I remember the days when I shuddered at the thought of breaking a 20 dollar bill.  My wife treated us to flurries at the local ice cream joint yesterday.  After contributing to the tip jar, she had three bucks bucks Bach from her 20.

 

Being brought up by parents who lived through the depression still informs my purchase processing thoughts today. 

[RNR1957NYer]

My favorite quote about govt sending paraphrased as I don't remember it exactly or who said it.  " A billion here, a couple billion there, pretty soon we will be talking of spending big money...

 

One of my favorite quotes too (I use it often when discussing construction costs and "value engineering"), it is widely credited  to Sen Everett Dirksen.

[RobertKB]

1 hour ago, greg g said:

 

I remember the days when I shuddered at the thought of breaking a 20 dollar bill.  

 

Yup, when I was 11, sixty years ago, a five dollar bill was a fortune. $5 now to my grandsons (11 and 13) is pocket change. We now break 20’s without thinking. Even a $50 bill gives us only slight pause. Gotta remember what wages were back then and what things cost compared to today for it to make sense. 

 

[T120]

May be hard to believe today...When I started my apprenticeship, the shop rate for a journeyman was $2.15 an hour. The starting rate for an apprentice was 35% of the journeyman rate with a 5% increase every 6 months. If I remember correctly,the first cheque stub I received,( should have kept it), showed my hourly rate as $.7525 x hours worked , rounded off to the nearest cent on the cheque...

[PT81PlymouthPickup]

Yep! And we had to walk to and from school 10 miles up hill both ways. What's up with these kids today? Lols!

I remember as a kid pumping gas in the 1960s at my dads station. He was paying me about 1.50 hr. and the gas price was about 30 cents a gallon.

Geez! I'm old! ?

[DonaldSmith]

I'm so old, that if I see a penny dime on the ground, I'll pick it up.  

 

(They got rid of pennies in Canada.  They should sell them all to us.  We used to circulate Canadian pennies with our 'Merican change, without regard to the exchange rate.  That's when we used to handle cash.  Now everything is  hand sanitizer and credit card. ) 

Edited August 28, 2020 by DonaldSmith
additional thought

[RNR1957NYer]

On 8/28/2020 at 7:34 AM, DonaldSmith said:

I'm so old, that if I see a penny dime on the ground, I'll pick it up.  

 

(They got rid of pennies in Canada.  They should sell them all to us.  We used to circulate Canadian pennies with our 'Merican change, without regard to the exchange rate.  That's when we used to handle cash.  Now everything is  hand sanitizer and credit card. ) 

I grew up in Western NY and same thing - Canadian change was common.  The only time you thought anything of it was that a Canadian coin wouldn't work in a pop (soda, for the rest of you) machine.  Thanks to the YMCA's bus trips to Crystal Beach Ont. I learned about the exchange rate - got an extra ride ticket per US dollar! 

[DonaldSmith]

To RNR:

 My mother's folks lived near Welland, Ontario, and once a year we visited them.  As a kid, I had little exposure to the exchange rate, but the Imperial Gallon of milk was one U.S. quart larger than the U.S. gallon.  The paper jugs were cone-shaped.  Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes were squat, and had an image of the Niagara Falls on them.

Crystal Beach:  Yes, we would get there, too.   

[RobertKB]

On 8/28/2020 at 5:34 AM, DonaldSmith said:

 

(They got rid of pennies in Canada.  They should sell them all to us.  We used to circulate Canadian pennies with our 'Merican change, without regard to the exchange rate.  That's when we used to handle cash.  Now everything is  hand sanitizer and credit card. ) 

 

Nickels are next to go. It hasn't happened yet but it won't be long as they cost more to produce than they are worth. I also love our $1.00 coin (Loonie) and $2.00 coin (Toonie). They are so much better than the bills they replaced. We've had the loonie since 1986 and the toonie shortly after. I don't understand how Americans put up with pennies and the mostly grungy and rumply one dollar bills still in use.

 

You can see where the loonie got its name from the picture and the toonie is just double the value.

 

 

Edited August 29, 2020 by RobertKB

[hi_volt]

My first job was working at an ice cream store.  My minimum wage salary was $1.35 an hour.  Back then the cash register we used only went up to $4.99 and we had to add everything up in our heads and then calculate the 4% sales tax and add that to the total.  If the total came out to $1.39, we had to simultaneously push down the $1, the 30 cent and the 9 cent key on the register.

[RNR1957NYer]

2 hours ago, DonaldSmith said:

To RNR:

 My mother's folks lived near Welland, Ontario, and once a year we visited them.  As a kid, I had little exposure to the exchange rate, but the Imperial Gallon of milk was one U.S. quart larger than the U.S. gallon.  The paper jugs were cone-shaped.  Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes were squat, and had an image of the Niagara Falls on them.

Crystal Beach:  Yes, we would get there, too.   

Hi Don,

When my grandfather emigrated from Sweden in the teens, he landed in Canada (the US had taken in its quota of Swedes that year) and he got a job as a powder man constructing the Welland Canal.  Eventually he brought the family (including my Mom, whose emigration papers said she crossed the Peace Bridge in a stroller) to the US, where he became a miner for USG in Oakfield, NY.  As a child I remember visits to family still in the Welland - Thorold area.  I was fascinated by the Canadian market MoPars of the late '50's and early '60's.

[Dan Hiebert]

When we lived in Wheatfield, just outside Buffalo, we used to visit the "Golden Horseshoe" (the western end of Lake Ontario, the area from Niagara Falls to Toronto) of Ontario on a regular basis.  Very pretty, with a lot of "touristy" stuff to see.  Somewhat nicer than western NY. 

[Dan Hiebert]

My wife is a numbers wiz.  She can do math in her head just as fast as I can with a calculator.  I am not a math wiz by any means, even with a calculator sometimes.  When our daughter was in school in Texas, she was in a special program called "Numbers Sense", where the kids competed in intramural math competitions.  They had to do all the math in their heads, and she apparently inherited my wife's thing for numbers.  When we moved to New Mexico, they didn't have anything close to that, and our daughter would get zero marks on her math tests because she didn't show her work, although she got the answer right.  The NM schools refused to believe kids could do math in their heads.

[Ulu]

The truth is that no school ever wants to believe that they are doing anything wrong, ever.

 

If they ever start realizing that, the purveyors of our educational system will have a strange comeuppance.

[Dodgeed]

Back in the late '80's and early '90's, when I was first learning to use spreadsheets, like LOTUS, and then, later, Excel, I would load in the formula, run the data, then check it w/my calculator, as I didn't 'trust' the computer to do it correctly. Sometimes, when the spreadsheet produced the answer, it just didn't look 'right', so I'd run the numbers on my calculator and a piece of paper, and sure enough, I was right, and the computer 'wrong'.  Of course, I'd loaded in some error in the formula in the spreadsheet, so, it was my fault. But, that's the way I learned to finally use spreadsheets.