Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

(via k. wray, which was via flowingdata.com)

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.

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.

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.

• 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.