Silly Little Country

Delicious Innumeracy

Yesterday's printed USAToday had this wonderfully fatuous sentence, about Christopher Waltz:

His "name recognition is up 99.999%", he says.

This wonderful stupidity is attributed to Waltz.  Who knows.  But I am 99.999% sure that whoeever said it thinks that adding nines after the decimal causes the factor of improvement of name recognition to increase significantly.
Er,. it doesn't.  My guess is reality requires you move the decimal.  He is likely 99,999% more recognized now.
But hey - why expect intelligence in a journalistic report?
Another possibility - Waltz WROTE it and then it would be very hard to know what he meant, if there is any sort of locale transformation going on.  He is, after all, Austrian.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 10:30 AM