Chance News 10

Quotation

The weather man is never wrong. Suppose he says that there's an 80% chance of rain. If it rains, the 80% chance came up; if it doesn't, the 20% chance came up! - Saul Barron .

From: Stastical Quotations

Forsooth

Literary License

"'Four million ... heard it. Ten percent remember it. One percent of those matter. One percent of those do something about it. That's still' - he does the math - 'four people.'" From: _The Betrayal_, by Sabin Willett, NY: Villard (Random House), 1998.

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

Logarithmetic behavior as metaphor

Ed Barbeau edits a very nice column called Fallacies, Flaws, and Flimflam in the College Mathematic Journal. In ´ ed's column in the November 2005 issue of the Journal, Norton Starr provides a contribution called "Logarithmic behaviour as metaphor". Norton provides examples from a wide variety of writers saying that something is growing laragithmically when they meant growing exponentially. Here are his three contributions from the New York Times: