{"id":775,"date":"2020-04-15T21:22:31","date_gmt":"2020-04-16T01:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/travellingcryptographer.com\/blog\/?p=775"},"modified":"2020-04-15T21:27:39","modified_gmt":"2020-04-16T01:27:39","slug":"orders-of-magnitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/travellingcryptographer.com\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/04\/15\/orders-of-magnitude\/","title":{"rendered":"Orders of Magnitude"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a full disclaimer, I’m terrible at arithmetic. Particularly if I think someone is analyzing my speed at manipulating numbers in my head. I think part of it is because I’ve had more than the average training in mathematics, and I think this is somehow supposed to make me a computer<\/em> in the original sense of the word. I don’t have the attention span to have thrived in that particular profession.<\/p>\n

As another disclaimer, even though I’m going to talk about COVID-19, I’m not claiming to be anything other than your typical armchair numbers person inspired by a global pandemic to ponder infectious disease. Except I guess it’s more like “standing desk” or “floor-sitting” numbers person, because I don’t own much furniture. But that’s another story.<\/p>\n

All that to say,\u00a0this article<\/a>\u00a0is inspiring a digression on orders of magnitude and the importance of context in interpreting numbers. The highlight is that the Governor of Oregon erroneously claimed a deal with Quest to buy 20,000 test kits (turns out the deal was for “just” 10,000):<\/p>\n

Brown hastily announced a deal that wasn\u2019t finalized and trumpeted an eye-popping number of tests that didn\u2019t prove to be accurate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oregon, like much of the country, has a testing and tracing problem that it does not appear to be solving, which I think is what the author of the article really wanted to say. I’m not going to try for a precise definition of “eye-popping” here, but I do imagine the term would satisfy the following:<\/p>\n