And that was already a bit of a guess (for all you stats fans, the value of 52,200 had a 90 per cent confidence interval of 23,400 to 94,300). I put ‘maths’ in inverted commas as many of the issues may be a poor engineering implementation of some analysis. This accident trajectory imagines accidents as similar to a barrage of stones being thrown at a system: only the ones which make it all the way through result in a disaster. And given that over three hundred children in the USA since 1990 have been named Abcde, it’s worth spelling this out: don’t name your child anything like Fake, Null or DECLARE.

But later in the game, when all the civilizations were becoming more, well, civilized, every leader had their aggression rating dropped by two. I found it more about when the wrong mathematics is chosen rather than when mathematics is done wrongly. When it was reopened, the Millennium Bridge was described as ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. My major criticism is that despite the clear over-arching theme of maths problems, the book still does not feel that cohesive. I was thinking some of my maths teacher friends might enjoy it and find it useful for illustrations in class.But to my eye it looks like two numbers of different sizes have been combined and have produced an unnecessary level of precision as a result. Carrying on in the same vein as Steve Null, I’d like you to meet Brian Test, Avery Blank and Jeff Sample. I know it’ll be a matter of a reader’s interests but about half of the book covered topics I regarded as dull, so you’ll need to work to find the ones that interest you. A local reporter with a flair for the dramatic took the opportunity to fry some eggs by placing a pan in the hotspot. The first story is about the Pepsi points contest where you could win a Harrier (military) jet if you were able to get 7 million Pepsi points.

Some of the ancient Sumerian records were written by a person seemingly named Kushim and signed off by their supervisor, Nisa. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. But if you are a parent, please don’t give your child a first name which will set them up for a lifetime of battling computers. The book-length answer to anyone who ever put their hand up in math class and asked, "When am I ever going to use this in the real world?The book is fine if you are looking for a book that shows how mathematics in its many practical applications goes wrong. I enjoyed the book but was a little disappointed that so much was taken from fields of computing and engineering, where the issue wasn't strictly a mathematical failure, but a failure, for example, to understand the limits of binary, or load-bearing, or resonant frequency. The figure of 51,999 was the difference between lives saved not using coal and deaths caused by solar. I believe that ‘regardless of flight phase’ is official FAA speak for ‘This could go down mid-flight.

There is an Australian word that is used to describe people that is affectionate, but when you learn its etymology, you wonder how it possibly ever could have come to common use. The reduced precision in a rounded number makes them also feel less accurate, even though that is often not the case. There's also a trick to the index that I didn't figure out (but the index is worth reading for itself, as well). Sometimes the punchline will come and then he will explain that the punchline was actually only one of the things that needed to go wrong for the whole thing to come crashing down.Not that you have to really try to make them, or put in lots of effort, the mistakes come easily enough, but a whole lot of things need to go very wrong for some mistakes to happen – that is the lovely thing about this book, it is quite forgiving of those who make mistakes – given that that is all of us, just about all of the time. Their official line on airworthiness was the requirement of ‘repetitive maintenance tasks for electrical power deactivation’.

It is my uninformed impression that in some industries, such as medicine and finance, which do tend to blame the individual, ignoring the whole system can lead to a culture of not admitting mistakes when they happen. It also contains puzzles, challenges, geometric socks, jokes about binary code and three deliberate mistakes. If you get it as a present then worth a read but I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it for a purchase, if you want an interesting popular science read.

To avoid being deleted as unwanted test data, when Brian Test started a new job, he brought in a cake for all his new colleagues to enjoy. With his delightful conversational style, honed in his stand-up maths shows, it feels as if Parker is a friend down the pub, relating the story of some technical disaster driven by maths and computing, or regaling us with a numerical cock-up. So, when it comes to names, if you inherit a database-killing last name, you can either wear it as a badge of honour or take some deed-poll action. After the official investigation had ruled out an earthquake, they found the culprit was an exercise class on the twelfth floor.