A million times too large

 Some people think about numbers in surprising ways. Back on March 6, 2020 on an MSNBC broadcast Brian Williams aired a tweet about how much money Mike Bloomberg had spent on the Democratic primary ($500 million). It said that since there were 327 million people in the country he could have given each person over $ 1 million.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At PolitiFact Bill McCarthy wrote about that in an article titled Bad math at MSNBC: Bloomberg’s ad spending wasn’t enough to give every American $1 million. As shown above, it really was just $1.53 per person, since the factor of a million cancels out. A YouTube video by Matt Parker at Stand-up Maths on March 24, 2020 titled Why do people keep getting this wrong? discusses how apparently folks are thinking of the Million as a unit rather than just part of a number. So, they do the division as 500/327 and then put the Millions back on. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never had that problem since back in high school. When I took chemistry, we learned to do math on a slide rule. The C and D scales were logarithmic and ran from one to ten (as shown above and explained in the Wikipedia article for Logarithm). You had to keep track of the exponent separately. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also, you had to make sure the units were consistent, so figuring out a how many seconds are in a day involved the factor label method shown above. Factor label is a form of Dimensional Analysis.

 

 An image of a sliderule came from Pearson Scott Foresman at Wikimedia Commons.