Topic : Accuracy

If 99.9 Percent Is Good Enough, Then …

Communicator, (InSight, Syncrude Canada Ltd., Communications Division), p. 6

Philanthropy

Maria Fedorovna, the empress of Russia and wife of Czar Alexander III, was known for her philanthropy. She once saved a prisoner from exile in Siberia by transposing a single comma in a warrant signed by Alexander. The czar had written: “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.” After Maria’s intervention, the note read: “Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.” The prisoner was eventually released.

Today in the Word, July 14, 1993

Misspelling

In the New York Times last year: “The ‘Candidates on Television’ listing yesterday misspelled the name of the Vice President in some editions. It is Quayle, not Quale. The Tmise regrets the error.”

Reader’s Digest

Statistics

Once when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was preparing a speech, he needed some economic statistics to back up a point he was trying to make. His advisers said it would take six months to get accurate figures.

“In that case, I’ll just use these rough estimates,” FDR said, and he wrote down some numbers in his text. “They’re reasonable figures and they support my point. “Besides,” he added as an afterthought, “it will keep my critics busy for at least six months just to prove me wrong.”

Bits & Pieces, June 25, 1992

Quote

Atomic Clock

Time technicians at the National Institute of Standards & Technology (Formerly the National Bureau of Standards) set a new level of precision in 1949 by inventing the atomic clock. It counted the oscillations of the nitrogen atom in an ammonia molecule--and was reliable to within one second in three years.

More recently, NIST switched to an atomic clock based on the vibrations of cesium atoms. It will need 300,000 years to gain or lose a single second. But NIST scientists are working on a still-better model: a single mercury ion will be trapped in a vacuum by laser beams and cooled to its lowest possible energy level. The atom’s oscillations will then be so stable that the new timepiece should be accurate to within one second in 10 billion years--the total life span of stars similar to our sun.

Business Week, reported in Resource, Mar/April, 1990

The Missing Zeros

It was a simple clerical error, but it could be the most expensive typo of all time. In 1978 Prudential, the largest insurance company in the U.S. loaned $160 million to United States Lines, a shipping firm. As part of the deal, Prudential got a lien on eight ships.

In 1986 U.S. Lines went into bankruptcy proceedings and started selling off assets. Prudential said it was owed nearly $93 million, the value of the lien, from the ships? sale. Or so the insurance company thought. A close look at the lien documents disclosed that someone had omitted three little zeros, thus entitling Prudential to $92,885 only instead of $92,885,000.

The mistake loomed larger when McLean Industries, parent firm of U.S. Lines, sold the ships for $67 million. In a settlement approved later by a federal court, McLean agreed to give Prudential the proceeds from the sale of the ships-minus $11 million. That was the price McLean demanded for disregarding the missing zeros.

Source unknown



created in 0.20 seconds
powered by
bible.org - YLSA