Walt at Random

Or, in more eloquent terms, duh.

I read this post at dave’s blog, about a middle school giving students PDAs to help make them technologically literate. It’s an interesting concept and an interesting experiment (and an interesting newspaper, referring to PDAs as “mini-computers,” adding a lovely protoVictorian feel to the whole discussion).

But I misread a key item in the story and David King’s quick comment–hey, I don’t know, it’s President’s Day, I’d just finished submitting a “PC Monitor” column, I’m multitasking, the dog ate my brain…

Anyway, I came up with $3,000 per PDA and felt obliged to make a snarky little comment, about the students apparently being trained to be defense contractors.

Submitted the comment. And almost immediately looked at King’s post again and slapped my forehead, because in the Old Math, $180,000 for 600 PDAs comes out to a perfectly reasonable $300. I was just off by one magnitude…

I submitted a followup comment, but feel obliged to add to that this pointer to King’s post. Go read it.

And I won’t make any similar mistakes for millions and millions of seconds, or until 2 p.m. today, whichever comes first.

This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Writing and blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.