One example that annoys me is when science stories in newspapers (especially stories about high energy physics or astronomy) insist on writing out large numbers, such writing $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,$ or writing things like trillion trillion, when neither is very useful to a reader with a high school education and neither would make any sense to anyone else. Why not write $10^{24}?$ Scientific notation is taught (in the U.S.) to students who have not yet begun the study of school algebra, and it is used in high school science classes.
Below are two other examples that I've previously posted about in the past.
Example 1: Atlanta mayor: In resettling evacuees, FEMA no help, CNN news article, 14 October 2005. [I previously posted a different version in this 15 October 2005 sci.math post.]
CNN anchor Miles O'Brien on Friday spoke about the challenges facing one city with Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. Atlanta took in 42,000 families fleeing the disaster.
O'BRIEN: All right, let's talk about this, 42,000 families. You're a big city. It's a prosperous city, but that still puts a burden on the city, doesn't it?
FRANKLIN: Well, it certainly does, but I don't think it's a burden that FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] can't help us to address.
The Congress and the president have allocated 62 billion [dollars]. Our estimates are that a family needs assistance for about six months in order to stabilize themselves and that would cost about 11,000 [dollars] per family. The city of Atlanta can't absorb that cost, but we can certainly work with FEMA, if they were willing, to help families get resettled in the city and the metropolitan area.
O'BRIEN: So 11,000 times 42,000. I can't do that kind of math on the fly here. But how much of that money have you seen?
Note: This is trivially estimated via $1$ times $4$ followed by $4+4=8$ zeros, or $400$ million. By missing this, and hence also the fact that $60$ billion divided by $400$ million is $(1.5)(100)=150,$ Miles O'Brien (a well known broadcast news journalist who, incidentally, specializes in science, technology, and aerospace reporting) missed a good opportunity to make a point I suspect he would have liked to make.
Example 2: Formerly posted in this 8 February 2009 math-teach post at Math Forum:
I wonder if the author of the article below has any awareness of just how mathematically illiterate one of the comments below makes professional news writers sound. The author writes "CNN checked McConnell's numbers with noted Temple University math professor and author John Allen Paulos" for something that any college-bound middle school student should be able to do, even without a calculator. Although some of Paulos' comments are nice, especially his speculation "People tend to lump [million, billion, trillion] together, perhaps because they rhyme", going to him in order to check McConnell's numbers is like asking a university linguist for the correct spelling of the word "especially".
I mention this because I've seen many examples of this over the years, especially newspaper writers consulting mathematicians for something that is nothing more than an easy high school level probability or combinatorics problem (easier than many of the problems in standard precalculus and college algebra texts). I don't know whether the reporters really don't know how to work these problems (like checking McConnell's numbers below) or whether they are just using the occasion to get some possibly interesting remarks from someone well known and don't realize how stupid their rationale sounds to a large percentage of their readership.
"Numb and number: Is trillion the new billion?" by Christine Romans CNN's American Morning
"To put a trillion dollars in context, if you spend a million dollars every day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spent a trillion," McConnell said.
CNN checked McConnell's numbers with noted Temple University math professor and author John Allen Paulos.
"A million dollars a day for 2,000 years is only three-quarters of a trillion dollars. It's a big number no matter how you slice it," Paulos said. Here's another way to look at it.
"A million seconds is about 11.5 days. A billion seconds is about 32 years, and a trillion seconds is 32,000 years," Paulos said. "People tend to lump them together, perhaps because they rhyme, but if you think of it in terms of a jail sentence, do you want to go to jail for 11.5 days or 32 years or maybe 32,000 years? So, they're vastly different, and people generally don't really have a real visceral grasp of the differences among them."
