The UK National Lottery has apparently pulled one of their recent contests because of some numerical confusion among their populace. The game involves buying a lottery card, then “scratching away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on the card”. Unfortunately, because the UK has foolishly chosen to use the metric system for temperature, that means negative numbers are common. And that just leads to disaster.
“On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
I phoned [the lottery company] and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I’m not having it.
You know, I’ve always said that the lottery is simply a tax on people who are bad at math—but this isn’t exactly what I meant!
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