I'm curious about something. Why are we so tied to the percent? By percent, I mean taking everything as a ratio out of 100. Why not out of 10? Or 1000? 99% sure seems like pretty close to the whole, but in some cases its really not going to cut it. When only 1 error can be a huge problem, 1 out of 100 chances is way too high a number. If 99% of people who go on a ride at Lagoon (our Utah amusement park) survive, that sounds pretty safe right? I mean 99% that's pretty high. Obviously there's been some deaths, so 100% would be a lie, so 99% is the next step down. But when you realize that probably close to 50 people get on that rickety white rollercoaster everytime, 99% would mean that someone is dying every other time the car goes out.
We are so tied to 100 in our system that we even have a sign (%) that means out of 100. The word is percentage, and there's no other option like permillage or perbillage (at least not that I'm aware of). So we get stuck using things like 99.9% or 99.99%, but honestly does either of those mean anything different to you? 99.99% is pretty much as close as I can fathom to 100%. 99.999% which is 10 times closer to 100% doesn't really seem much closer than 99.9%, does it? When did we decide that 100 was our reference number of choice for all (and by all, I mean most) ratios? Any one know why this is?
3 comments:
sounds like you are a fan of the micromort
Yeah yeah whatever blah blah blah. Can't you talk about anything else? All we want to hear about is who is bringing your alert from yellow to orange. C'mon, J! Give the people what they want!
All in good time. I don't want to get ahead of myself. Once the status has officially changed to orange there will be an official memo posted explaining the change. Until then I can neither confirm nor deny any details of the situation in question. Right its looking like it might be til next weekend before there's a change.
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