I was amused and appalled by George Vaccaro's blog entry Verizon doesn't know Dollars from Cents, in which he describes the inability of Verizon workers to understand that there is a difference between ".002 dollars" and ".002 cents". Keith and I listened to the audio of his customer service phone calls. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

George: [big sigh] Okay, I think I have to do this again. Do you recognize that there's a difference between one dollar and one cent?

Andrea (customer support representative): Definitely.

G: Do you recognize there's a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?

A: Definitely

G: Then, do you therefore recognize there's a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents

A: No.

G: No?

A: I mean there's... there's no .002 dollars.

My favorite comment was from a Slashdotter who wished that Verizon off-shored their call center to India.

Verizon eventually agreed to refund the overcharge, but there's no word yet on whether they'll do so for the uncounted other people who received a misquote.

"It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so."

"There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves."

"If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?"

"Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear to be bright until you hear them speak."

A kind visitor contributed a link to Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?, a Slate article by Katie Roiphe (herself controversial) that questions whether Maureen Dowd's failure to find a husband really stems from her intelligence or might be due to something else about her. (An obvious candidate would be her tendency toward gross generalizations, such as "Deep down all men want the same thing: a virgin in a gingham dress".)

One of my favorite cartoons, Joy of Tech fortuitously reran a relevant cartoon today.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Most women would rather be beautiful than smart because most men can see better than they can think.

If you weren't around for the 1986 claim that an unmarried forty-year-old woman had a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married (which turned out not to be true), here's a new horror story. According to a recent column (soon to be a book) by feminist Maureen Dowd:

"A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise."

This factoid (which I predict will also be shown untrue) would have been terrifying to me before I went to college, where I found that smart women are very much in demand. (Actually, I'd already found that out at high school math club.) Among heterosexuals I've known in CS, many brilliant men have been unsuccessful at finding partners, while almost all of the women who want to be appear happiliy partnered.

[Note: An earlier version of this post listed some of my current and past employers (MIT, Microsoft, and Google) as places where heterosexual women were likelier than men to be partnered. I realized, though, that I can't back up that claim. It could just be that my female co-workers are more likely than male ones to share information with me about their romantic status, and I falsely assume that men who don't say anything are unpartnered and women who don't say anything are satisfied with their relationship status. I should stick to quantitative science.]

Nevertheless, after reading the above article, I felt grateful to be married, which my high IQ should supposedly preclude (although I consider IQ tests bogus). If it's on the Internet, it must be true.

"It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom."