Why Does This Work?
Aaron Telian is one of my daily reads on my personal blogroll. Firefox has a neat deal with active bookmarks so I can dip in when he has written something new.
(An unsolicited endorsement. Hope that's OK. Firefox is the greatest internet browswer ever. Nearly virus free. So many features and the extended features, one I am writing on one right now called performancing is tremendous. It's an HTML editor sort of. Great stuff. So, get Firefox, it's free and makes that dumb explorer look like a really bad kindergarten picnic).
Back to Aaron. I digressed.
He tells a story today that I have heard, most of the time about change in an elevator.
It's about Seventeen Mules. One Half, one third and one ninth.
Read it please and then tell me, Why does this work. I have heard it enough times to say it puzzles the math out of me.
Ken, you're the math whiz. Why does this work? Explain it to all of us.
1 comment:
what was the issue to begin with? since 1/2 and 1/3 and 1/9 do not add up to a whole, there was plenty of room to round in the first place. if the first son took his 8 1/2 or his 9 whole mules and the second took his 5 2/3 or 6 whole mules and the last took his 1 8/9 or 2 whole mules, that adds up to 17. where was the problem??? the helpful neighbor added no value. the moral of this story is only that sometimes we get all excited about something we think is a problem that isn't if we just calmed down did the math. no i do NOT mean global warming. it really IS a problem. the math there shows that.
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