USA Today – Innumeracy https://innumeracy.net The Mathematical Equivalent of Illiteracy..... Fri, 14 Apr 2017 17:20:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 105994619 The Mother of All Math Errors https://innumeracy.net/the-mother-of-all-math-errors/ https://innumeracy.net/the-mother-of-all-math-errors/#respond Fri, 14 Apr 2017 17:20:28 +0000 http://innumeracy.net/?p=125 First, a disclaimer. War is awful. As is people dying. I won’t get into the politics of recent events, just the math.

It’s time to call out USA Today for what it is. Not quite fake news, the right words might just be “a mathematical abomination.”

The graphic might be visually pleasing to some. “Hey, the bomb was 5 times the height of a man.” Ok. Then, the comparison to the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima. The text suggests this bomb was more than 2/3 as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. And that text made it past a number of employees at USA Today. But not one of them had the mathematical gut to realize something was wrong. The Hiroshima bomb was an atom bomb. Its blast was equal to not 15 tons of TNT, but 15 kilotons, or 15,000 tons. The Atom bomb was more than 1300 times as powerful as the bomb just dropped in Afghanistan.

USA Today deserves their own category for innumeracy. This is typical for the paper.

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