Last night, I decided to follow the Iowa Caucus thing: Apparently Obama and Huckabee are now considered (repectively) Democratic and Republican front runners. I also tuned into to hear their speeches and thought they were dull and boring. This brings me to the actual topic of this posting: over at the BBC, readers discuss the surprising win of the two White House hopefuls and the following comment just stuck out (and trust me, I didn’t take it out of context). I took the freedom to highlight the ‘offending’ portion:
As a Ron Paul supporter, I feel neutral about the Iowa results. We weren’t expecting to do well there, we beat Guiliani, and were only 3% away from 3rd place. On the other hand, 5th place people don’t get talked about. I am optomistic[sic] about Wyoming and to a lesser extend New Hampshire.
This is like saying that I was born 10% earlier than my twin brother. And I’m 45 grams sure he would protest to that fact, since he has always claimed that it was him who kicked me out of my mother’s womb because he thought ‘I needed to grow up and get a life’ (which I eventually did for 73% of my life, which is 3 grams more than him).
3 Percent of what is that again? Maybe some people should be barred from using statistics and percentages.
Way earlier, I read this brilliant UnCov commentary about Pownce, which is a Web 2.0 site that allows you to send ‘stuff’ to your loved ones. Which is sort of less similar like sending mail with attachments, nonetheless. Too bad the Pownce’s lead programmer pulled the post about ‘how to do rounding of floating point numbers’: it be interesting to know why a lead programmer would round floating point numbers using strings (the pulled article had interesting comments how to do this nicely using simple math, but alas).