If you’ve ever gone for a walk down main street in Santa Monica, you may have passed by a store front filled with all kinds of paraphernalia. This is the home of jAdis, a museum of sorts, filled with props from TV and movie history, from a model of the robot in Metropolis to a spitting image of everyone’s favorite crypt keeper.
Hey there good lookin’…
No doubt maintaining such a large collection of Tinseltown history is not necessarily an inexpensive endeavor – for this reason, there is a nominal fee for those wishing to enter jAdis and sift through its treasures. Unfortunately, it looks like someone forgot to double-check the pricing scheme.
I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to charge more per person if you have more than one person in your group, but something tells me this bold strategy may not pan out. Then again, I’m sure people just assume they are saving money by using the group rates. Maybe they meant to say that one person is $3 instead of $2 – this would then make everything consistent.
Whether it’s a typo or not, if you decide to pony up the cash, make sure you and your friends pay separately. And remember: the group discount is not always what it seems.
UPDATE (11/24/09): The manager of jAdis was kind enough to respond to my post – you can see the comment below. We were told by a freind of your concerns about our Math. Apparently the price scheme is deliberate, and I am comforted by the fact that “9 out of 10″ people seem to be in on the joke. This is a relief.
I apologize for my silence over the past few weeks – I have been out of the country learning math and eating pancakes. While I get back into the swing of things, I’ve got a couple of points to mention that relate to earlier posts regarding our collective inability to correctly use the decimal point.
The first is a picture from a flyer advertising maid service. Here’s the ad (sent in to me by a dedicated foot soldier in the army that is my readership, a.k.a. my mother):
Names and phone numbers have been cropped out to protect the innocent. But in a case such as this, are there really any innocents?
Although we’ve seen decimal point errors on signs before, this one is arguably the most egregious of all. Presumably the intended price is $100 – if that’s the case, then not only is the decimal point in the wrong place, it’s not even necessary. It’s hard to imagine how this mistake could’ve been made and then gone unchecked, but if you live in San Francisco and are looking for some cheap maid service, I can definitely hook you up. Also, if anyone else has pictures which evidence a lacking in mathematical proficiency, feel free to send them my way.
On a related note, while we all knew that Verizon employees suck at math, apparently this low tolerance for mathematical ability among cell phone providers spreads even wider. More specifically, there is evidence that AT&T employees suck at math, too.
This fact has been brought to us courtesy of MythBusters co-host Adam Savage. According to this article, at the end of last month Mr. Savage was charged $11,000 for a few hours of web browsing while in Canada. This figure alone should be enough to make us skeptical of the math at work, but what’s worse is that when customer service tried to explain the charges, they told savage that “data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb.”
Depicted here is the effortless charm and confident sophistication that comes with a knowledge of mathematics.
Last week, I went to a number theory conference in Utah. The conference was very good, and I learned quite a lot, which I suppose is the goal of any such conference. The location of the conference itself was also quite nice – it was close to the mountains, a lake, and the home of Blendtec, famous for their “Will it Blend” series of videos.
As you might expect, most of what I learned on this conference pertained to number theory. However, there were lessons outside of this sphere of knowledge as well. The one lesson I will share with you is best encapsulated in this picture:
That’s right – Ghiradelli now makes salad.
It was my friend Jack who pointed out the placement of the decimal point. Apparently the people who work in cafeterias in Utah are the same people who work at Verizon call centers. If you ever want cheap salad, I guess this is the place to go – $0.0029 per ounce is a price that can’t be beat!
It’s unlikely that anyone will try to exploit this small misprint to score a pound of salad for just under 5 cents, but someone would certainly be within his or her rights to do so. The lesson I learned is that even when you are surrounded by mathematicians, you are never truly safe from the consequences of an insufficient math education. Of course, at the end of the day, the typo really is inconsequential, but as highlighted in the Verizon call I posted earlier, even simple misunderstandings such as these can have significant consequences.
Then again, maybe the salad really was that cheap, in which case I really should have stuffed my luggage with vegetables.
If you’ve got the time, and/or the patience, listening to this audio clip of George Vaccaro try to deal with a series of Verizon representatives who claim that 0.002 = 0.00002 should be enough to strike fear into your heart regarding the future of mathematical literacy in this country. Then again, he’s talking about problems he had while in Canada, so maybe the reps are Canadian. We’d never make such an obvious mistake here in the States, right? Right…
On a related note, I would encourage all of you to start writing the dollar amounts on your checks as more complicated mathematical expressions. Everyone could use a boost to their mathematical literacy, bankers included.
The audio clip is quite long, and the longer it goes on, the more depressing it gets.
Hey there good lookin’…
