Paulette points out a hilarious example of innumeracy in a newspaper article about mathematical modeling of a recent bridge collapse:

... Bruce Magladry, the Director of the National Transportation Safety Board's Office of Highway Safety, said the agency will use a computer to simulate how the bridge might have behaved with different loads, and with different parts of the bridge failing. He said there are an infinite number of combinations to test, so they might have to run the simulation 50 times, or 5,000. ...

Infinity is rather small in some people's minds!

(from the West Central Tribune article "Searchers find 6th, 7th victims in I-35W bridge disaster" by Patrick Condon, 9 Aug 2007; cf. ChartJunk (20 Jul 2007), ...)

TopicScience - TopicHumor - 2007-08-10

(correlates: BuSab, BlogAndWiki, WarGames, ...)