4 ms·
If you want to amuse yourself, count the times you see people write things like "$10 dollars". It's quite common. Technically it should mean 10 square dollars
by ScottBurson 12y ago
If you want to amuse yourself, count the times you see people write things like "$10 dollars". It's quite common. Technically it should mean 10 square dollars, whatever that is.
Years ago an acquaintance of mine told me about a bad experience he had had with some cell company's customer service. It seems that the contract he had received had said that he would be charged for data service at the rate of ".02¢/kilobyte". (This was in the very early days of cellular data, so prices weren't well established, and I'm probably not remembering the correct number, but as you'll see, that's not the point.) When the bill came, he found that he was in fact charged 2¢/kB -- 100 times more than he expected. He called to complain, but was unable to communicate to the customer service agent that, correctly read, .02¢ = $.0002. The agent apparently looked at the notation ".02¢" and read it as "$.02".
One can understand the psychology of this. The notation ".02¢" contains two indications that the value 2 is to be multiplied by 1/100: one is given by the position of the decimal point, and the other by the use of the cent sign instead of the dollar sign. But if you read those two indications as redundant rather than independent, you get the interpretation used by the agent (and apparently also by the person who wrote the contract).
So I would suggest that the "$10 dollars" thing is not as benign as it appears. Mathematical notation is not supposed to have redundancies in it, and we should not get used to seeing them there -- particularly when money is involved.
- grkvlt 12y agoI think your friend was actually trying to tell you about this story [1] not something that actually happened to them. [1] http://verizonmath.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html http://verizonmath.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-kno...
- whichfawkes 12y agoMaybe his acquaintance has a blog?
- ScottBurson 12y agoPossibly. As I recall, he was pretty upset about it, which seems to suggest it happened to him -- but it was a long time ago, and we all know memory is a funny thing.
- jbuzbee 12y ago"we all know memory is a funny thing." - Yeah, tell that to Brian Williams - rim-shot :-)
- StavrosK 12y agoThe exact same thing happened to me, in Greece. There are more than one person who have been affected by this :P People are just bad at math.
- SilasX 12y ago>If you want to amuse yourself, count the times you see people write things like "$10 dollars". It's quite common. Technically it should mean 10 square dollars, whatever that is. Not quite the same thing, but I had a senile biology teacher who looked for any pretense to deduct points on papers. For example, when you reported data from lab work in tabular form: "points off -- these numbers don't have units". "But the column headings indicate the units -- that would make it redundant!" "Not good enough."
- thornygreb 12y agoOne of my first jobs, I was tasked with spray painting the price (99 cents each) of landscape timbers on a big pile of uh, landscape timbers. I painted '.99 c', and my boss said, you just gave them away for less than a penny. It is hard to un-spray paint a dot, lessen learned FOREVER.
- eru 12y agoActually, mathematical notation often has quite some redundancy. But yeah, you don't want to hunt it down in too many different places.