In case you haven’t heard yet, Verizon customer service representatives can’t do basic math. This one guy moved to Canada and selected a plan that was quoted to cost “0.002 cents/kilobyte”. But when the bill came he was being charged 0.002 dollars/kilobyte.

Seems like a simple problem, right? Wrong. Evidently Verizon employees and managers have no idea that “0.002 cents” is DIFFERENT than “0.002 dollars”. Here’s a short clip [40sec] from one of his phone calls to customer service:

Caller: Do you recognize that there’s a difference between 1 dollar and 1 cent?
Verizon manager: Definitely.
Caller: Do you recognize that there’s a difference between 0.5 dollar and 0.5 cent?
Verizon manager: Definitely.
Caller: Then, do you therefore recognize that there is a difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents?
Verizon manager: [pause] No.

Classic. What’s incredible is that EVERYONE he talked to didn’t understand the difference. He even walks them through all of the math at a simple 2nd grade level and still couldn’t get them to understand. You can listen to the entire 27 minute long exchange and judge for yourself - it’s a little bit scary how inept most people seem to be at math.

You can see the original post here.

Ever wait forever in a traffic jam, only to find that when you finally get clear there was no apparent reason for it? You might have experienced a phantom traffic jam. William Beaty performs some traffic experiments and talks quite eloquently about how to help the situation.

I distinctly recall my father, while on our annual pilgrimage to the east coast, always did what he called “pacing”. Being a mathematically (and otherwise) intelligent man I think he came to the same conclusion that others have: a smooth flowing line of traffic will move more cars.

So if you find yourself stuck in a jam, try to leave some extra space in front of you - by doing so you will allow your braking to be less severe and thus cause fewer people behind you to spread the wave of stopped traffic backward.

I just read a fascinating article about the square root of -1 (or commonly known as i) over at one of the more geeky blogs I read: Good Math, Bad Math. History + Math + Complex Concepts That Make Me Feel Smart = Happy Mike:

It got its name as the imaginary number as a result of a diatribe by Rene Descartes, who believed it was a phony artifact of sloppy algebra. He did not accept that it had any meaning at all: thus it was an “imaginary” number.
…
Once the reality of i as a number was accepted, mathematics was changed irrevocably. Instead of the numbers described by algebraic equations being points on a line, suddenly they become points on a plane.

I’m not sure if I understand i any better, but I certainly enjoyed reading about it.

3/14 is that one magical day where we can celebrate Pi, 3.1415926535 … you get the idea. Here are a few tidbits about this “magical” irrational number:

• Ten decimals are sufficient to give the circumference of the earth to a fraction of an inch.
• You can find your hat size by measuring the circumference of your head, divide by Pi, then round off to the nearest 1/8th inch.
• The earliest known record of an individual realizing that the ratio between a circle’s circumference and it’s diameter is constant comes from an Egyptian scribe named Ahmes in 1650 BCE.
• The Romans often stubbornly used an estimation of 3 and 1/8th for Pi (even though they clearly knew that 3 and 1/7th is a closer estimation). They reasoned that it was eaiser for their legions to determine 1/2 of 1/2 of 1/2 instead of 1/7th.

Most of this information is from The Joy Of Pi by David Blatner. Take a closer look at the Pi image on the right.