Thursday, May 11, 2006
Return to an old subject: innumeracy
I haven't written about innumeracy in more than a year, so it's overdue. Consider this from The New York Times:
Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike demanded answers from the Bush administration on Thursday about a report that the National Security Agency had collected records of millions of domestic phone calls.But, as the article continues, the records of "tens of millions" of customers were involved. Now, I don't know about you, but I probably make a thousand phone calls a year, easily. Some people make more than that, obviously, and others fewer, but let's go with a thousand, and let's be generous and say there were only ten million customers' records turned over (it quite likely was a hundred million). That adds up to billions of domestic phone calls, not "millions." Only three orders of magnitude off. At a minimum. It could well be more.
