{"id":3833,"date":"2023-02-27T01:15:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-27T06:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=3833"},"modified":"2023-02-11T07:30:42","modified_gmt":"2023-02-11T12:30:42","slug":"50-is-not-one-half","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2023\/02\/50-is-not-one-half\/","title":{"rendered":"50% is Not One Half"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>A review of percent may surprise some. Sorry about that. Use this information cautiously.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I recently read a contract that purported to calculate 50% of 50%. That struck me as odd, so given too much time on my hands, I thought about it a while. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Warning<\/strong>: thinking about basic things for a while can reveal information that makes people mad at you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Going back to the word problems we used to do back when we scratched on the walls of caves with rocks&#8230; the word &#8220;of&#8221; translated to &#8220;multiply something.&#8221; For example, &#8220;a tenth of the cost&#8221; meant we multiplied 0.1 and the cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let&#8217;s go back to 50% of 50%. That translates to multiplying 50% and 50%. The answer is 2,500 percent squared. No, wait a minute. Half of 50% is 25%. Everyone knows that. What is is this 2,500 stuff?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I go back to the basics (here is where people become mad at me). 50% is not a half.  50% is a half (0.5 for us decimal point folks) times 100%. That&#8217;s how we go from 0.5 to 50%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This leads us to things like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>25% is not a quarter, it is a quarter times 100%.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>10% is not a tenth, it is a tenth times 100%.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>75% is not three quarters, it is three quarters times 100%.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But everyone knows that 50% is a half, 25% is a quarter, and so on. I told you this would make people mad at you. And everyone knows that 50% of 50% is 25% or a quarter. So, Mr. smarty pants (as my mother would tell me), stop all this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is often what happens when I think about basic things. It seems like folks today don&#8217;t like to consider basic things. I guess I was always in the 1% of the 1% in the strange-folks list. ooops, 1% of 1% is 1 percent squared which has no meaning which&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips A review of percent may surprise some. Sorry about that. Use this information cautiously. I recently read a contract that purported to calculate 50% of 50%. That struck me as odd, so given too much time on my hands, I thought about it a while. Warning: thinking about basic things for a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[380,293,374,382],"tags":[381,294,372,383],"class_list":["post-3833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-approximation","category-concepts","category-data-science","category-mathematics","tag-approximation","tag-concepts","tag-data-science","tag-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3834,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3833\/revisions\/3834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}