What Stringer's Reading

I wanted to teach my students about estimates and significant figures, so I asked them to estimate the height of the Empire State Building. In a class of ten students, not one came within a factor of two of the correct answer (1472 feet). Most of the estimates were between 300 and 500 feet. One person thought 50 feet was right, a truly amazing underestimate; another thought it was a mile... This startling episode had a deep effect on me.

It is fashionable for people to decry the appalling illiteracy of this generation, particularly its supposed inability to write grammatical English. But what of the appalling innumeracy of most people, old and young, when it comes to making sense of the numbers that [...] run their lives?

Douglas R. Hofstadter - Metamagical Themas
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