Wow. How did these people make it past elementary school?

Or, their burgers weren't as good.

Or, while Jane Fonda's VHS-fitness fantasies swept the boomers as they entered the Lay-Z-Boy years, a third of a pound sounded like too much, even for A&W's assembly-line clientele.

In those same years, "focus groups" convinced one of America's stateliest cash engines that it was time to dance naked.

A man from another industry once put it like this: "Nobody knows anything."

@Crid: "Or, their burgers weren't as good."

That's as plausible an explanation as any. The last couple A&W burgers I had struck me as a little too dry. Can't beat 'em on the root beer, though.

Mom and Dad still talk about their last visit to the local A&W. They liked the burgers better than other fast-food burgers, at the time. But that fateful day, they got burgers that had big chunks of dry powder filler in 'em. They never went back.
I just heard that story again last week.

At least Taco Bell can claim it as seasonings/sauce.

None of this surprises me. I daresay most Americans today would not be able to pass the math portion of a GED exam from the '50s. And the thing is, nobody cares. Once upon a time, the launch of Sputnik I set off a national panic about the state of our STEM education. Nowdays, China is openly seeking to militarize space, but thinking about that takes too much time away from video games and Real Housewives.

This ignorance persists, across to politics, of course.

Idiocy attends the idea that raising the minimm wage is a good idea.

"How did these people make it past elementary school?"

Social advancement by school administrators. It's a cattle chute - keep 'em moving through.

I've watched this progress since they first let kids use calculators in school. Years ago, I impressed some young co-workers with my amazing ability to add numbers mentally. I thought they were pulling my chain til they got out a calculator to make sure I was right.

The movie "Idiocracy" continues to look more and more like a documentary. I'm actually a little torn by this issue. On the one hand it does not bode well for our American way of life. On the other (selfish) hand, as an aging engineer I am less worried about younger folks displacing me. As long as I can stand to work for our future foreign overlords I may have more opportunities than most.

People fear math, and it's considered OK and cute to say, "EEEwww numbers. I'm not a 'math person.' " It's considered especially cute when women do this. Needs to stop.

At one of my former jobs, my editor had us take Poynter's "Math for Journalists" test: http://www.unc.edu/~pmeyer/carstat/mathtestquestions.html

There is NOTHING on this test that goes above middle school (or late elementary school) math. With a calculator, it is a cake walk. I had to scribble out a couple of doodles for some of the problems, and some of the questions took me longer than they probably should have. However, NONE were hard. But oh the whining. Most people immediately declared, "This is too HARD" and gave up.

When I was a lad back in the '50s my father predicted television would produce more American millionaires than any other industry before the century was out.
He never imagined the wave of innumeracy making finance the industry that produced more American billionaires than even real estate.
Welcome, chumps!

I wonder if it might have to do with the term quarter. I had a problem with it for the longest time and I remember chatting with some dorm mates in college several of them admitted to the same thing. I just didn't associate quarter with 1/4. I think it has to do with the way I was taught.
Fractions where half (had some trouble there to), a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Sometime later the term quarter got introduced and it never really stuck. For awhile I thought it ment 15 (minutes) from telling time.

If you asked me today and I was not thinking about it which was bigger...a quarter or a fourth I would likely say a quarter. If you asked a third or a fourth I would get a third right off...not so sure about a third or a quarter.

A second thought....quarter is the natural (at this point) size of a burger....I think if I saw a burger that was 1/3 I might think of it as 1/3 of a quarter pounder.

I remember in the 80s my father hated A&W food...loved the rootbeer...so we rarely went.

I think that this explains why Hardee's later named their larger burgers the $6.00 Burger and the Thickburger.

Hardee's is Carl's Jr. for those of you west of the Rockies.

WOULD YOU LIKE SOME EXTRA BIG-ASS FRIES WITH THAT? -- Idiocracy

> WOULD YOU LIKE SOME EXTRA…

When you go to Google and type "welcome to c", it finishes your blog-comment joke for you.

*****The movie "Idiocracy" continues to look more and more like a documentary. *****

Totally beat me to it.

Here's another book: "Innumeracy," by John Allen Paulos. I first heard of him in the My Turn column in Newsweek, before the book.

From Amazon:

"Why do even well-educated people understand so little about mathematics? And what are the costs of our innumeracy? John Allen Paulos, in his celebrated bestseller first published in 1988, argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers and the probabilities associated with them results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions, and an increased susceptibility to pseudoscience of all kinds. Innumeracy lets us know what we're missing, and how we can do something about it.

"Sprinkling his discussion of numbers and probabilities with quirky stories and anecdotes, Paulos ranges freely over many aspects of modern life, from contested elections to sports stats, from stock scams and newspaper psychics to diet and medical claims, sex discrimination, insurance, lotteries, and drug testing. Readers of Innumeracy will be rewarded with scores of astonishing facts, a fistful of powerful ideas, and, most important, a clearer, more quantitative way of looking at their world."

One lament of his that I remember was that while most American adults (in the 1980s, anyway) wouldn't admit it if they couldn't read well above the 8th-grade level, they have no such qualms about not being able to grasp math above that grade level.

Why are we pointing at someone else?

Who here had a problem with the term, "microrem", and that the laws of physics could not be set aside to make this "millirem".