The rate of change of gasoline

Is it better to fill up a gas take once a week for $80, or put in a quarter tank 4 times a week for $20 each time?  That question does have two reasonable answers, depending in no small part on whether you have access to $80 or just to $20 at a time, but what isn’t in doubt is that four quarter-fill-ups at $20 each isn’t actually cheaper overall than one full-fill-up at $80.  Or at least, that shouldn’t be in doubt.

There’s an article about it here, but it doesn’t lessen the confusion at all.

(The reference to the question of  which is closer, the West Cost or the Moon, is a reference to a discussion from a year ago.)

Math Mistake (sort of) – the problem with negatives

It has been a while since we’ve seen a math mistake in the news, but a recent search turned up an old one that I’d never seen (Thanks TwoPi for pointing it out!)  And the funny thing is, it’s not actually a mistake at all – the math is correct.  And that’s the problem.

Back in November of 2007, the National Lottery in the United Kingdom had a new scratchoff ticket for their “Cool Cash” Lotto.  The idea behind the game was the a person would scratch to reveal a specific temperature — say, 15º — and would then scratch to reveal  three more temperatures.  If any of these three numbers was lower than the Chosen Special one (15º in this example), then the person won a prize.  Hooray!

But this was in the UK, which uses Celsius, and negative temperatures are pretty common in the winter.  So the target temperature might be something like –7º, and the three additional temperatures might be –6º, –5º, and –4º.  From a mathematically correct point of view,  that’s not a winning ticket because all the numbers are above –7º.  But people who focused on the numberals 6, 5, and 4, all of which are less than 7, thought they’d won.

It took but a day for this to become a problem, and after no small amount of confusion on the part of customers and shopkeepers, the tickets were pulled.  They had lasted less than a week.  Lottery we hardly knew ye.

For more details, including a video, see the article in the Manchester Evening News:
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/cool-cash-card-confusion-1009701