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Showing posts from January, 2012

Numeracy fail

Side note- it's been a looong time since I wrote a blog post. Since then, I've had a second child, moved jobs (I'm now working at SparkFun - woot!), states (Colorado is state number six for me), and time zones. A lot of the more technical sort of blog post I'd write now goes up on the SparkFun website as tutorials, but I'm going to try to post more here. Engineers and scientists (and other general nerd/geek types) like to talk about "numeracy", which is the ability of a person to grok math. It used to be that the primary "complaint" (if you will) was about people who play the lottery- "a tax on being bad at math". I'm not talking about valuation, here- being willing to pay five- to tenfold as much for a meal at a restaurant as it would cost to make at home, for instance. I'm talking about hard numbers- apples to apples. Having a poor grasp on mathematics is getting to be a bigger handicap, though. I've notice recently wh