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Converting between units can be hard, as seen before (and before and before).  Fortunately, food containers often include both English units and Metric units.  Unfortunately, those two don’t always match.  Take, for example, Producers Sour Cream.  Their 32 oz container says it has 907 grams, which is about what you’d expect.  The 16-ounce container has half has many.  Not half of 907, but half of that again:  in bold defiance of the laws of physics, it sports a mere 226 grams.

This mistake has apparently gone on for years.  What’s equally strange is that the various nutrition sites that include information about this product also say 16 oz (226g) without comment.     Because, as stated above, units are hard.

Thanks to Philip Bailey for bringing this to our attention!  And speaking of Math Mistakes, as I was, several of the mistakes listed in this very blog are published in the PRIMUS article “Math Mistakes that Make the News” by Yours Truly, which can be downloaded for free during the month of March (2015).

Back in the 80s, there was a commercial for Faberge Organic Shampoo.  And even if the shampoo doesn’t sound familiar, you might have heard of the ad (“…and they tell two friends…”)

Hey, it’s exponential functions!  1 friend tells 2 friends, those 2 friends tell 4 friends, those 4 friends tell 9 friends, those…wait, 9?  Where did that come from?  And then those 9(?) friends tell 16 people.  So it almost works, except that after the photo of 2 people they decided to switch to perfect squares.

Fortunately, a later ad brings the whole thing to a halt before reaching 9:

Good job Faberge people – you skipped the 9!  Of course, this one went straight from 1, 2, 4 to 16 before diving headlong into a grid of 24 people, so I’m not sure it was much of a mathematical improvement.

Threesixty360…your source for commenting on 30 year old math mistakes that have already been well documented.

Decimal points are small, and so easy to lose.  And it appears that many of them were lost on FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) forms, which is NOT a place that you would want incorrect data.  According to an official document from July 18, people filling out the form were supposed to round monetary values to the nearest dollar, rather than using exact dollar-and-cents amounts.  But some people put down cents anyway, and the computer didn’t alert them, or tell them there was a problem.  No, it slyly accepted the amounts, and then threw all the decimal points in the trash, so [as the official memo said], and income that had been recorded as $5000.19 was suddenly interpreted as $500019, which is one heck of a sweet income and probably enough to disqualify you from most financial aid.

This didn’t happen with just a couple people, either – The Wire says that 200,000 people are likely to be affected.  And because it’s more than just a couple, schools have to look at all those applications, every single one, to catch any errors.  Those errors might be that people didn’t get aid who should, which is a bummer, but it could also mean that people got too much money.  That doesn’t sound as bad initially, but the July 18 memo says, ” If such aid has already been disbursed the institution may need to change awards and return (or have the student return) any overawarded funds.”  I can’t imagine that it will go over all that well for a school to tell someone to give back money that was promised, so I suspect this messiness will last a while.

Hat tip to Yousuf for pointing out this article!

Zero degree (Celsius) is cold.  But you know what’s really cold?  Negative zero.  At least according to the sign that our colleague Nicole saw in Canada.

From a recent Nature Valley ad in the London Metro newspaper:

Perhaps the second bar is twice as delicious as the first.

Via Language Log.  Photo from Spiderham.

The folk from Glee paid unintended homage to the title of this week’s episode (“A Night of Neglect”) by showing Mr. Schuester forgetting his basic math skills.  Actually that’s not entirely true; he does math in his head correctly as he explains his plan to use salt-water taffy to earn money to go to Nationals in New York:

When I was a student here we paid for our entire trip to Nationals selling this….  So, to make $5000 at 25 cents apiece, we need to sell 20,000 pieces of taffy.

So far, so good.  But wait, what’s that equation in the background?

Poor Will…he didn’t even notice that the equation wasn’t quite right (and neither did the four members of the Academic Decathalon team).  But don’t worry, we understand how busy this time of year is, what with all the projects and end of the year assignments coming due.  So shall we just fix that up for you?

There, all better.   Now you can go concentrate on raising that money.  Just be sure to have someone else in charge of the ledger.

We’ve been luggage shopping recently in honor of an upcoming sabbatical (and in recognition of the fact that pretty much every piece of luggage we own is ripped:  turns out that the combination of buying the cheapest possible suitcases and cramming them as full as possible is maybe not the best for their long-term health.)  I was looking up different kinds of suitcases, and after staring at too many numbers for too long, I suddenly noticed something weird.  The error as near as I can tell is systemmatic — it was in in the stats for every piece I looked at for this company.  Here’s an example (chosen deliberately from the newest model line, since I initially wondered if it had been fixed).

Can you find it, and tell what the (web designer?  programmer?) did wrong mathematically?

[I actually found this a couple weeks ago and send them an email to let them know, but haven’t received any reply and as of today nothing had been changed online.  I suspect it’s buried in someone’s mailbox somewhere.]

The photo in the upper left is actually of a piece of artwork called Travellers Garden by John Grimshaw at the Old Mangotsfield Station.  The photo, licensed by CC Atribuition-ShareAlike 2.0, is by Linda Bailey and can be found, of course, on Wikipedia.

Isn’t it great how many places are giving such big discounts?  It’s not quite two for the price of three, but still…

see more Epic Fails

And to think, it’s still good for another month!