In which I assert my math-geek prowess
Posted on February 22, 2008 by David
Dear Mr. Hamill,
Every day there are countless factual errors in your newspaper. I forgive most every one–it’s surely hard work to meet a deadline day in and day out. Every day there are also a handful of cringeworthy efforts at cleverness. These gratuitous wastes of ink are, with rare exception, less forgivable. And when these cloying turds are combined with errors, I feel it my duty to ask you to, please, knock it the fuck off.
You could have been cute by saying something something about “moving the decimal point a few notches to the left” but, no, you had to bring the square root into the equation. (See that, clever pun, eh?). But rest assured, the square root of 1% is 10%, so, good sir, you fail in this sentence: “But for decades he struggled to reach enough people, even though he lowered the necessary figure to the square root of 1 percent. ”
No transcendence for you.
PS: while we’re on the subject of square roots, I dust off my favorite math joke:
Q: What’s the square root of 69?
A: Ate something.
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2 Responses to “In which I assert my math-geek prowess”
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I think he meant the square root of (1% of the population), as opposed to (the square root of 1%) of the population.
Oops…posted that before I scrolled down to the bottom of the article and saw that they’ve posted a correction. I wonder how many derisive emails he got from the math geeks?