Fired-up eco-boffin gives it '180 per cent' Old school football managers are often heard to confess they're "as sick as a parrot" because despite the lads "giving it 110 percent", their team has just taken a severe pasting. The problem is, 110 per cent just isn't enough of an overcrank for the modern world we live in. The proof comes in the form of environmental …
I recently got into an argument with some "online folk" who genuinely believed that "giving 110%" was a valid statement and worthy goal.
They were soon smashed down with something called "reality" and maths but not before one of them pointed out that he won't recruit someone "who only gives 90-100%" because that means "they are cruising". I weep for humanity.
It depends what the 100% baseline is: if your employer expects an 8-hour day, are you giving him (/her) 110% if you work an extra 48 minutes?
Even better, if you can start working expected to do sod all, then "giving 1000%" becomes not only possible, but really rather easy.
Next time someone says they want someone to "give 110%", ask them "of what?"
"in which case it's reasonable to suggest the scale is divided by 50 per cent and capped at a peak of 100 per cent."
X / (50% of X) = X / (X / 2) = 2
Or did you mean divide the scale by two and cap at 100%?
In which case footballers are down to 55% and I'm coasting along at only 15% (Monday to Friday, less at weekends).
At the end of the day, El Reg has to compile all the values into one list, give each a corresponding name based on the source, and add it to the recognised Weights and Measures list.
Mine's the one made of 169% proof PVC.
(yes, I do know there's no such thing as % proof, that's the whole point)
I once had a manager who refused to grade anyone at appraisal time as 'exceeds expectations' or 'greatly exceeds expectations' (which would have resulted in bigger annual pay increase) on the grounds that his expectation was that all his staff would give 100% and they couldn't exceed that! Bastard!
100% in the design of rocket engines, is the engine level that allows the engine to be run with zero degradation. Meaning the engine can be receovered and used again with minimal part replacement or maintenance.
However, it is common practice to run the engines at slightly more then this during certain periods of the launch to achieve an increase in thrust. This does entail that you need to spend more on maintenance and replacement parts for the recovered engines, but it tends to work out as being more economical, as the extra thrust allows you to launch extra mass.
Close, but not quite. 100% engine rating on the Space Shuttle Main Engine refers to the original designed output power. As it turned out, over many real world tests, the maximum thrust without degradation on an SSME was around 104%. However it doesn't make sense to redefine what 100% meant, as this renders all previous data incorrect, or requires it to be recalculated.
For a known entity, it never makes sense to redefine the 100% baseline.
Program on telly t'other day had some bod scanning a flock of sheep and reported the pregnancy rate as 181.3% - it actual made sense, as it was an average over the flock, and 1 lamb meant that the ewe was 100% pregnant (you can't be 'a little bit pregnant'), twins was counted as 200%, triplets 300% and so on.
Still an interesting concept though!
I'm probably not the first to mention it, but going from 110% to 180% is only about a 38, 39% increase.
So when you've giving 180%, each of your %s is worth less than someone going from, say, a monday-morning 30% to a "barely-acceptable by modern management standards" 100%; they're giving >142% more work for their 70% increase in 'how much they're giving'.
And this trend continues as time goes on- going from 100% to 200% is a 100% improvement, but going from 200% to 300% is only an extra 50% better. That's a pretty staggaring drop in quality from the person who says they're 'giving more'.
FTA:
'"I am somebody who if I believe in something, I give it 180 per cent."
That's an impressive 70 per cent improvement on the best efforts of professional footballers'
No - it's a 70 percentage <b>point</b> increase on the effort of a footaballer. It's clearly a ~64% increase.
I trust that the Reg put this in purely to generate vitriolic comments, because otherwise I WEEP FOR HUMANITY.
I was a parent govenor at my sons primary school a few years back. It was a pretty highly achieving school accoriding to SATs results (well, given the background of the intake that wasn't exactly surprising) so the level SATs results were in the high 90%'s and Science had achieved 100% for a couple of years ... so we were very amused when one year the targets for the school arrived from the LEA tell the school that its target was that 102% of pupils achieved level 4 in Science that year! Turned out all the targets were simply autogenerated by multiplying the previous years results by the percentage improvement the LEA was aiming for overall!
Only bullshit merchants use this kind of twaddle.
If somebody does absolutely nothing and then one day he twitches his little finger then that is a INFINATE % increase in activity. Something divided by zero is Infinity.
Just don't tell the BS Merchants as they will shortly be exclaiming how they managed to improve the deal by 100 Infinate %. ;)
% = statistics = BS!
Yeah, I hear that a lot. It depends on the something.
In practice, division by zero usually arises when people start with a model, like "A/B" and extrapolate. If A is definitely non-zero and non-infinite, but B tends to zero, limit(A/B) is certainly infinite. However, if both A and B tend to infinity or zero, their ratio may be defiantly finite. It might be 0, or it might be 110%, and if you know a little bit more about A and B you might be able to figure out the right answer. (Google for L'Hopital's Rule if you care.)
Consequently, if you simply pose a problem like "0/0" or "∞/∞" then you haven't provided enough information. It's a bit like walking up to someone in the street and saying "What's the answer, then?".
If you established that a pregnant sheep is a sheep which bears 1 lamb, then yes, this makes sense.
Of course that would be silly with animals that have a high chance of giving birth to twins or triplets and you would instead say that a pregnant sheep is any sheep which bears any number of lambs. Now your pregnancy rate is down to normal again.
if their basic concept of math is this bad, how can we possibly expect them to create or interpret intricate models of a system no one yet has all the proper inputs for?
explains the economic theories that American political leadership uses too.
for El Reg to classify a standard Unit of measurement for effort, I suspect I may already have a formula. Since power is the RATE at which WORK IS DONE, we can simply measure it in Watts.
However, as it appears that certain industries require their people to give more than others, what is clearly needed is a compliance factor which will be inversely proportional so that our measurement of effort works across all borders. So for example, if a footballer was expected to put in twice as much work per hour as a trolley dolly down the local supermarket, then footballers compliance factor would be '1' and the Trolley Dolly's would be '2'.
Therefore, our formula of:
Effort = compliance factor * Power
then the work done by the Trolley Dolly in an hour should be half that of the football to achieve the same 'effort' rating, as this is what is expected of them.
Now all we we need a unit for our measurement, may I suggest the BS
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I give infinity % +1....
Top that!!!!
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Is that all?
I give infinity % +2
Please consider yourself topped!
That was easy. Now I'm off to leverage my stakeholders, synergistically mind, in order to produce optimum outcomes in the near-field but with a laser-like long-term focus on the game-changers upcoming in the market event horizon.
My son went to the University of Pennsylvania. At a "parent orientation", we were greeted by a faculty member who told us that, even though the new students were among the brightest in the nation, he expected fully half of those who graduated would be in the bottom 50% of the class.
Knowing more than a little math, I just smiled, but some of the other parents had really scared looks for the longest time. I think they expected everybody to graduate in the top 2%.
...I used to work in a copy shop. You should have seen the disappointed looks from people when I told them their copies had come out upside down.
Amazingly, I was not fired - nor was the guy who changed the POS keyboard numpad from 123, 456, 789 to phone-style 789, 456, 123. Most cashiers weren't touch typists... So people would get charged $2.33 instead of $8.99, or $75.43 instead of $15.49.
Good times. I was in the money, too - they screwed up payroll and were paying at time-and-a-half... All the time. Being a generally honest guy, I notified them... Twice. After the second time I decided that my responsibility to fix their accounting only went so far...
I always give a billion% on a Monday morning, nearly 5billion% by Tuesday... of course % of what would be an interesting question.
The idiots that come up with this should just be asked that question - % of what? I don't care if they are talking 1%, 100%, 180%... % of what should be the automatic response, followed by arsehole
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