Sunday, April 26, 2009

When you see two numbers ...

... do something to them. Sometimes one of those numbers isn't in the story, but it's usually close at hand:

A biography of Mr. Zinkhan, 47, on the university Web site said he was the co-author of two books, on consumption and electronic commerce, and had served as editor of The Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and of The Journal of Advertising. He received a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1981 and a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1974. He joined the faculty at the University of Georgia in 1994.*

The number you want to invite to the party is "2009," which you'll find in the folio line at the top of the page. Try subtracting the subject's age from that. Now compare the result to the year he got his undergraduate degree (1974). Precocious, huh?

I'm not even sure we should call it "math," since it's rarely more complicated than addition and subtraction, but -- DTFM. Every time. Please.

* His age is given as 47 in the national edn that we get up here, but it's 57 (which the AP had been using since Saturday) in the online version as of this writing. If you can shed light on when it was fixed, pls do.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Reminds me of the following, which gave me a good laugh at the time:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2009/04/beware_of_undead_astronomers.php

3:26 AM, April 27, 2009  

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