Friday, January 04, 2008

-5 > -6 (the > symbol means "greater than")

This is awesomely pathetic, and wonderful, and depressing as hell. It's bad enough that people waste their money on lottery tickets; it's even worse when they can't even figure out if they've fecking won.

From the November 3, 2007 Manchester Evening News:

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it.

The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.
The rest of the article is here. For those who are confused by the apparently very cold temperatures, those are in degrees Celsius.

Via Chance News.