# Wherein I'm gobsmacked by ignorance **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [September 30, 2009, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072 "2009-09-30T04:37:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![GameHat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ed655f/32.png) [@GameHat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GameHat)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/61 "2009-10-01T04:47:49Z")
> [@astro](#): > > I can see decimalizing seconds as part a conversion equation, but as a stand alone measurement specification sent to customers it really doesn’t seem (to me) to make a whole lot of sense to be using very non-standard base ten statement of elapsed time in recording reaction times. Eh, plenty of our customers run their own QC on our product before they will accept it. Enough of them know that 0.9 minutes is 54 seconds. After all, they have chemists and engineers too. Like I said, the industry standard is to report minutes and decimal minutes. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 5:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/62 "2009-10-01T05:02:04Z")
> [@Cardinal](#): > > I’ve had a number of students stare at a grade of something like 10/12 and ask with real confusion, “What kind of a grade is that?” > > “Well, what’s 90% of 12?” Dumfounded look. “What’s 10% of 12?” Dumfounded look. Trying to get from that point to the point that they understand they didn’t miss 2.4 points, so it must be a B grade is more than I can usually handle. Heh heh. I love this. The total for all my classes is always 100 for my own end-of-semester easy math. Individual grades often end up as “16[sup]7[/sup]/[sub]8[/sub] **/** 19” and students are completely, totally flummoxed. I then explain that basic math skills are a prerequisite for a college English class. They hate that. (I never go below eighths, and I have a fraction-to-decimal converter on the syllabus. Many still can’t handle it.) ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 7:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/63 "2009-10-01T07:53:57Z")
> [@GameHat](#): > > Eh, plenty of our customers run their own QC on our product before they will accept it. Enough of them know that 0.9 minutes is 54 seconds. After all, they have chemists and engineers too. > > Like I said, the industry standard is to report minutes and decimal minutes. Which sector, please? It’s just curiosity, I’ve worked in different branches of the chemical sector for a couple decades and in a dozen countries and the closest I ever got to that was the QC manager who wanted us to “recalibrate” tape measures by scratching new lines on them… ---
**Author:** ![SiXSwordS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/49beb7/32.png) [@SiXSwordS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SiXSwordS)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/64 "2009-10-01T12:06:43Z")
Not that it’s more serious than chemical specifications, but in my case I’m almost always dealing with how much someone is being charged or getting paid-- an issue anyone can understand with their pocketbook. To simplify, I often see the situation where someone has “punched-in” at 12|00 and “punched-out” at 12|50. Assuming one dollar per hour, that means that they are getting paid 50 cents rather than 83 cents. (I use the ‘|’ rather than the ‘:’ because while 12:50 _looks_ like it is _obviously_ in standard minutes, I have seen times written 12:75 and even 12.15 for twelve-fifteen.) Of course, no one is being charged or paid one dollar an hour. (Seeing 33 cents on the sidewalk, many people wouldn’t bother to pick it up.) The last time I saw this happen (simplified), we had to charge $125 rather than $207.50. ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/65 "2009-10-01T15:37:10Z")
Great story. In fact it is going into my memory bank as a potential twist in a murder mystery or something. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/66 "2009-10-01T16:21:46Z")
> [@](#): > > Great story. In fact it is going into my memory bank as a potential twist in a murder mystery or something. Asimov used something similar in one of his Black Widowers stories. There, it was a defense attorney whose client’s alibi depended on such a misinterpretation of a clock (a witness had put him on the scene at “half past nine”, which was actually 9:50) ---
**Author:** ![GameHat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ed655f/32.png) [@GameHat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GameHat)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/67 "2009-10-02T06:30:20Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Which sector, please? It’s just curiosity, I’ve worked in different branches of the chemical sector for a couple decades and in a dozen countries and the closest I ever got to that was the QC manager who wanted us to “recalibrate” tape measures by scratching new lines on them… Composite polymers. I’ll grant - we have a LOT of customers that are basically guys that have opened shops in their garages. Little education. They certainly don’t do much QC themselves. Either the product works or it doesn’t. But we have more than a few highly sophisticated customers. Sectors include energy, corrosion, transportation. Trust me, these guys have no lack of serious technical skill and education at their disposal. And they do, from time to time, reject a load because the reaction time from their measurement was less than a minute off. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. But minutes to the decimal do matter. ---
**Author:** ![bengangmo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/50afbb/32.png) [@bengangmo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bengangmo)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 10:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/68 "2009-10-02T10:10:11Z")
> [@Jackknifed\_Juggernaut](#): > > Yes, but imagine if you had to add or multiply the results for some unknown purpose. It would be very difficult to do without having everything in decimals. Or if the error tolerances were in % form then decimal minutes might be easier to work with ---
**Author:** ![Enginerd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/bcef8e/32.png) [@Enginerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enginerd)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/69 "2009-10-02T15:31:10Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Not to the “centiminute,” not to the “deciminute,” which are nonexisting units, but _to the second_. If you need things to the second, the logical thing to do is record them either in seconds and their usual multipliers (minutes, hours) or in seconds. This. The test took neither 15.9 minutes nor 15:54 - it took 954 seconds. 954 +/- 3 seconds, if you want to include the precision as well. ---
**Author:** ![norinew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/eb9ed0/32.png) [@norinew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/norinew)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/70 "2009-10-02T16:25:21Z")
A few months ago, I went to the supermarket to get a salad from the salad bar; while there, I picked up an individual packet of dressing. When I went to check out, the packet of dressing wouldn’t scan (self-checkout), so I handed it to the cashier who was minding the self-checkout. She asked if I remembered how much the packets were. I said they were marked “three for a dollar”. I could just _see_ the gears turning in her head. Then she said, “So, that’s, what? Twenty-five cents?”:smack: When I went to the doctor’s office on Wednesday to have the staples from my surgery removed, the physician’s assistant was taking some information about how I was doing, and I had to _tell_ her how to spell “incision”. I also had to tell her what a “nephrectomy” was (she asked me what I’d had done). Now, most folks on the street would probably not know this, but she is a _physician’s assistant_ in a _urology practice_. Sigh. ---
**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/71 "2009-10-02T17:34:16Z")
> [@GameHat](#): > > Thirty years of tainted data. :eek: Will the company have to retroactively re-test all of its products from the past 30 years because of the bad data? :eek: ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/72 "2009-10-02T18:53:37Z")
> [@norinew](#): > > I said they were marked “three for a dollar”. I could just _see_ the gears turning in her head. Then she said, “So, that’s, what? Twenty-five cents?”:smack: Take the 8.3 cents and run. > [@](#): > > I also had to tell her what a “nephrectomy” was (she asked me what I’d had done). Now, most folks on the street would probably not know this, but she is a _physician’s assistant_ in a _urology practice_. Sigh. I’m going to guess that nephr + ectomy = kidney removal. ---
**Author:** ![norinew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/eb9ed0/32.png) [@norinew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/norinew)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/73 "2009-10-02T19:51:32Z")
> [@Shot\_From\_Guns](#): > > Take the 8.3 cents and run. I would have, but I’m not sure what I would have done with that kind of cash. So I corrected her. 😉 > [@](#): > > I’m going to guess that nephr + ectomy = kidney removal. See, _you_ can figure it out, and you are not a doctor’s assistant at a urology practice! :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![jock123](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jock123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jock123)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 10:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/74 "2009-10-22T10:49:36Z")
I’m just not getting this: was the guy inconsistent or not? If he wasn’t, then you don’t have thirty years of corrupt data - you have thirty years of _good_ data, which the _original poster_ has misinterpreted. It also seems plain snarky to say that converting to decimal time is “easy”, when I was taught at primary school to add and subtract minutes and seconds (which works just as well for navigation and geometry as with time), and that to me is “easy” - so why do you need to convert? There also seems to be some problem with the colon and the point - I see either used fairly interchangeably to denote hours of the day; to denote minutes and seconds as a duration, I would use ’ and " (e.g. 1’23" is a duration in minutes and second, not a time of day). ---
**Author:** ![dhkendall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dhkendall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dhkendall)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/75 "2009-10-22T13:48:45Z")
> [@Cardinal](#): > > I’ve had a number of students stare at a grade of something like 10/12 and ask with real confusion, “What kind of a grade is that?” > > “Well, what’s 90% of 12?” Dumfounded look. “What’s 10% of 12?” Dumfounded look. Trying to get from that point to the point that they understand they didn’t miss 2.4 points, so it must be a B grade is more than I can usually handle. This would be the first warning sign that they didn’t deserve a 10/12 mark … > [@norinew](#): > > A few months ago, I went to the supermarket to get a salad from the salad bar; while there, I picked up an individual packet of dressing. When I went to check out, the packet of dressing wouldn’t scan (self-checkout), so I handed it to the cashier who was minding the self-checkout. She asked if I remembered how much the packets were. I said they were marked “three for a dollar”. I could just _see_ the gears turning in her head. Then she said, “So, that’s, what? Twenty-five cents?”:smack: What, you’re not profitting from the stupidity of others? What kind of Doper are you?? > [@norinew](#): > > I would have, but I’m not sure what I would have done with that kind of cash. So I corrected her. 😉 I like that answer better. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![thirdname](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/d07c76/32.png) [@thirdname](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thirdname)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072/76 "2009-10-22T14:44:07Z")
> [@Mahna\_Mahna](#): > > Ouch. > > Kind of reminds me that conversation a cellular customer had with his cellular provider about their data roaming rates. (The recording has been taken off YouTube, but there’s a transcript [here](http://consumerist.com/consumer/asinine/transcript-verizon-doesnt-know-how-to-count-220723.php)) Here it is, Verizon Math Fail: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCJ3Oz5JVKs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCJ3Oz5JVKs) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wherein-im-gobsmacked-by-ignorance/512072.md?page=3)