Number Games

Chromecast has been used 400,000,000 times. What does that mean?

Many years ago, I read A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. It had a simple, unsurprising premise: numbers can be manipulated to drive people to whatever conclusion you want. It was interesting seeing all the clever ways people use to deputize numbers into service of a greater story.

Amazon is great at this. They skate by with vague statements like “the highest selling product in the electronics category” or “the fastest selling reader in fiscal quarter Q2.” We hear “biggest” or “fastest” and think “sounds like…