The new Bureau of Land Management regulation, which applies to nearly 90,000 wells on federal public land, is hampered by math errors and overly optimistic cost projections.
I was reading a work that contained a bunch of quotes and anecdotes from WW2. One of them contained a bit from some guy in the US Army who said that he was the one who pushed for the 25 mission requirement for bomber crews. His justification used for 25 was that they’d worked out that one had an average 2% chance of death in a mission, and so 25 missions came out to a 50% chance of overall survival, even coin flip, seemed fair.
I was reading that and was kinda stunned. That math is wrong. The chance isn’t additive. You don’t have a 102% chance of death after 51 missions.
Your chance of survival is .98^N, where N is the number of missions. The mission count to reach a 50% chance of survival could be found by log base 0.98 of 0.50, or ln(.50)/ln(.98)=~34.
Now, yes, the 50% chance was arbitrary, but assuming the guy’s account was right, he just made a decision affecting an enormous number of people’s lives with a math error.
que dr evil air quotes around the “math error”
I was reading a work that contained a bunch of quotes and anecdotes from WW2. One of them contained a bit from some guy in the US Army who said that he was the one who pushed for the 25 mission requirement for bomber crews. His justification used for 25 was that they’d worked out that one had an average 2% chance of death in a mission, and so 25 missions came out to a 50% chance of overall survival, even coin flip, seemed fair.
I was reading that and was kinda stunned. That math is wrong. The chance isn’t additive. You don’t have a 102% chance of death after 51 missions.
Your chance of survival is
.98^N, where N is the number of missions. The mission count to reach a 50% chance of survival could be found by log base 0.98 of 0.50, orln(.50)/ln(.98)=~34.Now, yes, the 50% chance was arbitrary, but assuming the guy’s account was right, he just made a decision affecting an enormous number of people’s lives with a math error.
People do make some pretty momentous math errors.