100%

this is my favorite percent

all other percentages are 100% not as cool

people who rep for 110% as still funny in any way are 100% wrong btw

Is this what I get for using "100%" twice in my description of the Janelle Monae set from last night?

110% is a reputable percentage, but it is less symmetrical than 100%. However, if we all thought asymmetry were funny all by itself, then we'd be laughing all the time.

99.9%

king of percentages

Let's ask an expert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iva_Y9W3hJ0

99.44 yo

Definitely not 99.5%, Fogerty has already warned us about that.

Jon this thread was 100% not about you or anything, I was just bein all sick in a hotel room and sayin to myself "I am 100% not gonna let this get to me" and then I thought, fuck yeah, I am 100% about being 100% at all times

i am 99% in agreement with you

What's 100% of 100%? How does he do that? Damn...

I believe in your 10,000% bro. And I know how 0% romantic it is to be sick in a hotel room. Least ya got signal.

(i am also prob in favor of 100% but i had to do a meat beat manifesto homage.)

99.9%

king of percentages

― Jarlrmai, Thursday, June 3, 2010 6:41 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

otm. that missing per cent makes it a bit mysterious.

150% is the frequency ratio of a perfect fifth, 100% is delicious unison

100%'s weirdness comes from this: it equals 1. It is so much easier to explain any other percent = a decimal point to students, but if you're like, "And 100%, that's the same thing as 1," they are totally baffled. Why that is harder to get than "Yeah, 9o%, that is the same as nine tenths or zero point nine," I can't really explain. The wholeness of it is strange! 100% is definitely something to meditate on.

It's not that it equals 1, it's that it equals all of whatever it is you're talking about.

I'm always talking about 1, though

'if you're like, "And 100%, that's the same thing as 1," they are totally baffled.'

huh? no way. that's easy peezy. you want baffling, explain how if you have a pie divided into three equal slices, it is 33.333333333333333333% of a pie.
That .3 keeps going on forever! but that pie slice is not forever--mediate on that!

Or how unless you engage in tempering, 12 steps add up to MORE than an octave...

Or how 0.49 recurring = 1/2

What people believe the least, in my experience, is that 0.9999 (9 repeating) = 1.

Ha I forgot that one was weird too

The wiki on that one is a fun read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...

http://www.freewebs.com/calvin-hobbes-org/dadandcalvinsrecordplayer.jpg

too darn tired to read that wiki article thoroughly now, but I'm fascinated that it starts off with the assertion that 0.9 recurring does = 1, I'd assumed it demonstrated a flaw in the number system rather than a legitimate aspect of it.

Students of mathematics often reject the equality of 0.999… and 1, for reasons ranging from their disparate appearance to deep misgivings over the limit concept and disagreements over the nature of infinitesimals. There are many common contributing factors to the confusion:

* Students are often "mentally committed to the notion that a number can be represented in one and only one way by a decimal." Seeing two manifestly different decimals representing the same number appears to be a paradox, which is amplified by the appearance of the seemingly well-understood number 1.[35]
* Some students interpret "0.999…" (or similar notation) as a large but finite string of 9s, possibly with a variable, unspecified length. If they accept an infinite string of nines, they may still expect a last 9 "at infinity".[36]
* Intuition and ambiguous teaching lead students to think of the limit of a sequence as a kind of infinite process rather than a fixed value, since a sequence need not reach its limit. Where students accept the difference between a sequence of numbers and its limit, they might read "0.999…" as meaning the sequence rather than its limit.[37]

SOrry to turn this to a number geek thing, I think maybe this was abt being stoked & fully in it!

http://www.tchirts.com/store/images/P/100_Latina_T-shirt_B_Blck-01.jpg

I like where this thread is going but i hope aerosmith isn't blowing chunks right now.

Abbot is blowing my mind like aerosmith is blowing his chunks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fma4rHK6dTw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EotJl93Omwo
just dancin

http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/g/ginuwine/album-100-ginuwine.jpg

ginuwine otm

I love 100% of posts on this thread, the number stuff is 100% fun!

Back to the middle and 'round again

... I was sick for 4 days in a lonely hotel room in perth once with raging tonsillitis. I know all too well how unfun that is. Get well J!

i get really angry when ppl random put things in percentage terms

for what % of those times do you get really angry Lamp

That is 24% so true.

i feel like, when this happen, ppl are failing to apply any real statistical rigour to their analysis and are, for lack of a better term, just making things up

my friend always tells me he is "60% certain" that something is going to happen, or has happened, or is happening now. he never even gives a margin of error

It is really easy to be deceptive with percentages, especially when you start saying "x% more than" or "x% less than." A book that really helped me see the insidiousness of this is 200% of Nothing: An Eye Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Math Abuse and Innumeracy by A K Dewdney. I feel small shame bringing this up as it is: 200% book in the 100% thread, and A K Dewdney has since become a 9/11 truther, which is insane. But it's a good book about lying with math.

"Roy, you said you were 90% certain it was this guy! YOU JUST WENT DOWN 15%!"

actually I also dislike it when people say they are only 75% committed to a candidate or whatever

there is only one percentage you should be about anything and that percentage is 100, go hard or go home

200% book in the 100% thread, and A K Dewdney has since become a 9/11 truther

also, this is 98% a crying shame and 2% lol

<3%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKlX_nnMVvI

A friend and I have long had a system of measuring our certainty of a statement based on percentage. As in, "Dude, no really, I'm like 90% on this one." Or as in, "Are you sure about that?" "Yeah, pretty much. I'm like 80-85%." It's a nice gauge. Keeps everybody honest.

Neither of us ever say we're 100% on anything, though. That would be ridiculous.

99.44 yo

Viewer mail: "Dear Dave, if Ivory soap is 99.44% pure, what's the other .66%?"

Dave, breaking open a fake prop bar of soap: "Delicious blueberry goo."

I sort of love it when people quantify something as having 3 halves e.g. 'He's like one half Viking, one half capuchin monk and one half potato'.

TEN PERDEC MOFOS

This thread makes me want sports stars to start saying things like " I gave it 1 out there today" in interviews.

SIX PERHEX SHIT CHECK ME OUT

OTOH I don't love it and in fact seethe inside when people continue to use 'decimate' to mean 'totally wipe out'.

Is it supposed to be killing 1/10 or 9/10 coz I've heard it both ways.

It is dividing the mass of men to be punished into groups of 10, and within each group of 10 they draw lots and the one loser gets killed. So yeah killing 1 in 10. I am surprised to learn this was actually a disciplinary measure used on one's OWN forces, I always thought it was something you did to the able bodied males of your opponent once you had captured their city etc!

There is a simpler method used by some Soviet commander in WWII apparently:

In his book Stalingrad, Antony Beevor recounts how, during the Second World War, a Soviet Corps commander of a division practiced decimation on retreating soldiers by walking down the line of soldiers at attention, and shooting every tenth soldier in the face until his TT-33 pistol ran out of ammunition.

this makes me imagine frantic shuffling going on and a lot of "after you, my friend" "no I insist" before the lineup.

Jon Lewis, I am a little wiser and a little more appalled thanks to you. And I'll probably never misuse "decimated" again, so good job.

Srsly, I have been misusing that word for years. Little did I know that the only correct usage is so specific that I may as well forget the word ever existed.

Right? If the Flyers decimate the Blackhawks, there are going to be much larger problems for the team than losing the Stanley Cup.

100% is my favorite chromeo song

I'll fess up to misusing it but I'm going to continue misusing it on the grounds that you could kill 1/10th of the each person's body, like the head part.
Also gonna keep misusing "begging the question" because there's no equivalent that sounds better.

Raising the question.

"Raising the question" isn't cool enough for you?

xp Yeah.

Just avoiding the one grammar aspie who is going to pipe up and point out that you mean "raising the question" is worth modifying your behavior, IMHO.

"Grammar aspie" was kind of a mean thing to say. I'm sorry.

I think people get hung up on the difference between "begging the question" and "I beg to differ". Just a theory.

"raising" doesn't have the tugging david copperfield feel of "begging"

w/ 'decimate' it's stupid to claim that people are 'misusing' it - there's a modern, alternate use of the word (which is much more useful than the historical definition) and you can find it among the definitions in any dictionary.

xp "Please sir, may I have some more reasoning?"

Well sure ppl aren't exactly MISUSING it but I really hate the idea that they don't know what a cool term it is (was?)

okay I can agree w/ that

I can think of ten words that people will say the same of in 200 years. Some in just 50.

Yeah, I think the meaning of the word "decimate" has expanded over time, as definitions tend to do. freedictionary.com:

dec·i·mate
1. To destroy or kill a large part of (a group).
2. Usage Problem
a. To inflict great destruction or damage on: The fawns decimated my rose bushes.
b. To reduce markedly in amount: a profligate heir who decimated his trust fund.
3. To select by lot and kill one in every ten of.

fuckin trust funders

Actually the "usage note" following that definition is kinda fascinating:

Usage Note: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group. Sixty-six percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. However, when the meaning is further extended to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, only 26 percent of the Panel accepts the usage.

How do I get to be on the "usage panel"????

You have to be a combination of jaymc, la lechera, and Superman.

that would do it, surely

I am neither Jewish nor fresh produce, so I doubt I would have a place on the panel.

Inside information: the anti-fresh-produce lobby totally rigged that election.

See these 'usage panels' are exactly the kind of thing Sarah Palin was trying to warn us about!