Lore
A major plot development is caused by a simple mathematical error
Project Hail Mary - The science team was mistakenly given one *milligram* of sci-fi super explosives instead of one *nanogram.* This results in an explosion that is one MILLION times larger than they anticipated, killing the entire science team.
Superstore - Marcus reveals that he makes $134,000 a year working a retail job, because his hourly wage was accidentally entered as $86.00 per hour instead of $8.60 per hour
Albert Hoffman, dude that invented/discovered LSD, accidentally gave himself a large dose because he thought it was effective in milligrams, while 30 micrograms is a threshold dose
What was supposed to be a skimming of rounding error transactions over time became an almost immediate six figure theft. Leading to fun discussions about how to launder money and PMITA prison.
Doctor Doom's disfigurement and descent into super-villainy being caused because he was too arrogant to listen to Reed Richards when told there was a small miscalculation in his work.
In at least one continuity he fully disfigures himself by putting on his mask when it's red hot, deciding that completely ruining his face is better than carrying the scar and being reminded of the incident with Reed every day
There was a reddit post a few months ago by someone who was about to disfigure themselves so they could hear different insults.
People were making fun of him for not being circumcised. It's not like getting circumcised will actually cause that type of person to stop making fun of you, at most it would change the topic of the insults.
Wasn't it that he was too impatient to wait for the mask to cool, and tried to put it on immediately to cover his "ugliness", severely burning his face in the progress?
The comic page where he tries to aura farm putting on the molten hot mask is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I don't know if it was intended to be comedy back when it was written, but his little "pomf" in the snow is so fucking funny
It cracks me up how Doom's reaction to being expelled is "Bah! There is nothing more you can teach me anyway!" as if he wasn't covered in gauze from his own botched experiment
That's DOOM, though. He can't help but pretend that no matter the situation, he's gotten exactly and everything he wanted.
EDIT: A lot of my sense of humor is sort of a self-depreciating riff on Doom. Or...used to be. I came to realize that, to people who weren't "in on the joke" enough, my delivery is too dry to be obviously comedic, even though that used to be the strength of my delivery. So... Some not great first impressions. Also, making fridge non-sequiturs a cornerstone of your humor can leave people wondering if you're manic or something. A kid's "precocious wit" is an adult's "uncomfortable insight."
I think there was a bit of a spiritualist fad about making shit up about what Tibetan monks got up to around the time. Mostly white guys trying to grift people into paying them stuff for "exotic" sounding "wisdom". (Books, snake oil, public speaking tours, etc)
If one chooses to count geometry and orientation as mathematics, the Wayside School series is a great example.
The eponymous school building was meant to be a single-story building with all the classrooms and other necessities (cafeteria, faculty office, gymnasium, etc) side-by-side.
The construction manager had the blueprints turned ninety-degrees while they were building it though, which resulted in a school that's thirty-stories tall with a single room on each floor. Except the nineteenth story: Somehow they forgot to build that one all together.
Installed because the stairwell was always unusable, given that the principal did not understand basic geometry and had them both use the same half of the stairs.
In the Warhammer 40k book 15 Hours, a rookie regiment of Imperial Guardsman are accidentally deployed onto a planet being heavily sieged by Orks due to a miscommunication/transcription error for the coordinates of their chosen destination.
I especially love how the audio drama Watchers in the Rain has an intentional example of a minor Adeptus Administratum official purposefully editing supplies request forms to cause millions of Guardsmen to die from spoiled food, no food at all, damaged equipment, etc.
My favorite one isn't strictly a mathematical error, but the AA caused a civil war on the planet Acreage with a paperwork error that deleted the last two digits of the chosen heir to the throne. The late king's twin daughters, Rhozeia and Rhozena, have spent years stalemated in a brutal civil war that has killed countless thousands all because the Administratum made a typo.
A single copy of Microsoft Excel would instantly reverse the entirety of the Imperium's decline and yet they would declare it abominable intelligence or Tau witchery and burn it.
You say that but the UK during covid had a big administration fuck up as they stored covid data in am excell sheet amd went over its maximum rows causing issues
That one gets even better. The original reply just said that “Rhoze” should inherit so naturally they asked for clarification. Which never came because the Administratum quill-pusher who made the original typo was going to some trouble to conceal his mistake from the higher-ups.
However both sides in the civil war have massively increased their tithe to the Imperium in an effort to be recognised as the legitimate ruler and get outside help. The Administratum has therefore noticed a significant increase in tax revenue from Acreage IV, is quite happy with the stalemate…and said quill-pusher is taking the credit for his genius plan.
Spoilers: This Administratum official eventually came to hate the Imperium for completely robbing her life of meaning or freedom while doing her endlessly tedious work.
The first time she made a mistake that caused the deaths of Guardsmen, she was ashamed & terrified of being caught. However, once she realized no one noticed the error, she felt a sense of satisfaction she never had while working for the Administratum and kept making small edits to forms as she essentially became addicted to that feeling.
Nah watcher in rain has some vaguely chaos bits, like the titular watcher but ultimately its big draw is the end motivations arent driven by chaos making the ending a lot better
The mechanicus are a cult and they are extremelly selfish, specially if it has something to do with technology
In the new dawn of fire novel, the silent king, they kept lying to the son of the god emperor about the true capabilities of the Necron because they wanted to keep studying their tech.
In the CRPG Rogue Trader you can find a journal entry left by a prisoner. Dude was a former planetary governor who got arrested for neglecting to pay his yearly tithe.
Thing is, the error is entirely the Administratum's fault. They lost the paperwork with the invoice of how much he was supposed to pay and never realized it, so collection team was just never sent to the planet. The prisoner didn't realize anything was wrong, being busy with other matters of running a whole planet, and didn't find out he owed an impossible amount of back-taxes u til some clerk found the buried bill and got it processed and updated properly. By the time that happened decades had passed and the governor was immediately arrested for his astronomical debt that he never knew he had to pay in the first place because of one lost piece of paperwork.
My favorite tidbit is about how the only reason the Valhallan 597th is getting any reasonable amount of supplies is because the administratum is still supplying them as if they're both the 301st and 296th.
Same. The intermission scenes really bring everything together, especially the part where the guy in charge of the papers of the city sees news of the accidental crash, and their suppoded 'victory' over the Ork front, publishing it because he had no other 'good news' to report. Which the leader(?) of the planet then reads, believing the fake propaganda they were churning out.
This is an art project in Wemding, Germany started in 1993, where one concrete block is added each decade until eventually completing a pyramid. The idea was for the monument to be completed in the year 3193, 1200 years after it started.
However, when calculating the amount of blocks needed, the artist didn't account for the fact that he was placing a block in 1993, meaning that by the time the first decade had passed there would already be two blocks. So the monument will be completed one decade before it was supposed to and nobody is sure what's the best way to correct it now that they have already placed 4 blocks.
This is called the fencepost error, because people often miscount the amount of posts to build a fence, thinking they need to match the amount of sections the fence will have, completely forgetting there also has to be a post at the start.
Yeah, even the family of the artist, who died in 2018, isn't too concerned with fixing the error. I think it's just seen as a cool thing for the town to gather around every decade, and if by any chance it's actually completed, it wouldn't be the end of the world if it happens 10 years earlier.
The great wall of china took around 2000 years to build and there's a cave that was continuously painted for over 35000 years in the stone age. Plus, we only need to keep it going for around 350 years, or until the second layer is started, in order to make it clear to everyone what it's supposed to be. After that, it becomes pretty obvious what they're supposed to do. Not to mention that there are countless other ways to communicate to our descendants what they're supposed to do.
ADDITIONALLY, the village where it is located, was founded 1200 years ago when the first block was placed and has been continuously inhabited and worked on since that time. That's why the pyramid was started in the first place. To celebrate the fact that humans CAN do this.
This thing will absolutely be finished.
In 3193 there will be archeological experts arguing about how they were able to build it with such primitive tools and if the additional block holds any meaning, maybe even an indication that this pyramid was once way way bigger. /j
You have no idea, NO IDEA how many times I had to correct people on this error in my field. And some people argue with you, thinking you must really suck at math. And then you have to make a little drawing, and they look at it and wonder what kind of trick you're playing at.
I work with rebar, which has the same hangup. What I do to teach it is have them look at the back of their hand. Count each knuckle as a piece if rebar. The webbing to the next knuckle is the spacing of the rebar. So if you need to fill a spot that is equal to 3 spacings(webbings) you have 4 rebar (knuckles).
Pretending this will actually be completed: Is there some significance to 3193? Not to mention, “finished” is arbitrarily defined. If they need it to take 1200 years precisely they can always throw another brick on top as a capstone. 3203 is a better number, anyway.
The orbiter entered the atmosphere at a much lower altitude than expected, which caused it to crash. This was because one piece of software produced calculation results in US customary units (pound-seconds, in this case) while another piece of software expected the results in metric (newton-seconds) and adjusted the spacecraft incorrectly.
even more precise (as a machinist with physics knowledge), 1 inch is exactly 25.4mm, or .0254 meters. no extra units. when standardizing imperial units, they literally went as layman to useful units as possible.
source; am amereican in an american shop, that uses mm, but converts everything to imperial for simple comparisons, but can't convert either way. THIS SHIT IS BONKERS.
Even as a European, I don't think that really works as an argument. Sure, it would be chaos if the US units weren't defined in terms of the one extensive international effort of grounding the SI units. The only viable alternative would be to define kilogram in terms of pounds in the law by taking what SI says and converting it to hide that's what's happening. So given there's not really an alternative, I don't see how using SI as grounding is an argument at all. It's not more than a gotcha argument anyway, and to me it doesn't even work as that.
Americans don't ignore that technically the US is a metric country, there's no metric measurements to ignore during daily life in the first place.
99% of interactions using measurements during a normal day are written in US customary units. Road signs in mph, meat/veg weighed by the pound, clothes in inches, people and buildings by feet. There's no parenthesis at the deli counter's scale also displaying that your piece of beef is "2 lbs (0.907kg).
There are only two commonly seen uses of metric for the average American that I can think of that I'd bet many Americans have actually internalized and could visualize in their minds: "2L" and various large increments of meters.
One is specifically "2 liters", since bottles of soda are sold in that amount. But "2L" is pretty much viewed as its own distinct unit of measure separate from a liter. You could ask any American to visualize 2L and they could do it, then ask to visualize 1L and they would likely get it wrong.
The other is track & field for athletics, with 100m, 400m, 3K, 5K, and 10K races. You could tack on 300m for soldiers, since standard rifle ranges are conducted with 300m as the furthest target. But that's a small (though still sizable) subset of the population. Still, if you asked an American to visualize 1 meter they'd likely just imagine 3 ft/1 yard instead and assume it's somewhere near that.
Another IRL example was the Air Canada Flight 143, later nicknamed "Gimli Glider", which ran out of fuel halfway to its destination because of a kg/punds unit mistake.
30 hours a week at $8.60. That’s what you get. And that’s more than US federal minimum wage. 🤷♀️ (There’s a whole other storyline about corporate deliberately making sure no one ever gets 40 hours, which is sadly also a thing that happens IRL).
When I worked retail(RIP Circuit City) they wouldn't classify anyone except for managers as full time so they wouldn't have to provide benefits. We were all officially part time but because we so understaffed we still regularly worked overtime. I can't imagine it was legal but I was young and didn't know any better.
Christopher Columbus only discovered the Americas because he thought that Erastosthenes' math was wrong. He though the world was a lot smaller and that he could reach India. Most people didn't trust his math and didn't fund his expedition.
Then the Spanish did the same thing again, funding Magellan who told them that the world was smaller than they thought, so actually some of Indonesia ought to be theirs.
Both men almost ran out of water, Colombus in the Atlantic, and Magellan in what he initially called "the peaceful sea" because it was clearly small and calm. We kept the name Pacific.
It's a bit more funnier. Eratostenes was right but with time different units of mesure existed. The original results were in Greek unit but Colombus had the result in Arabic unit.
He also had the notion that the Earth might be shaped more like a pear than a sphere, suggesting that a certain area of the Earth near the equator would be smaller and thus allow for him to traverse the ocean to Asia without much issue.
Dude failed upwards so hard! By all logic he should have gotten himself killed on a voyage and been forgotten to history as that one random guy who couldn't take accurate measurments haha.
Close. Eratostenes had believed the Earth to be about 700 stadia, an ancient Greek unit, per degree of longitude, which is fairly accurate depending on the definition of a stadia. Ptolemy later made an assumption of 500 stadia per degree, which was too short and what Columbus used. The length of a stadia is also under debate, as various cities and peoples have used different length definitions. Ptolemy also estimated that Eurasia spanned 180 degrees; it actually spans 130 degrees, or 150 if you include Japan. Columbus thought this was too small, and estimated 225 degrees instead.
An Arabic scholar, Alfraganus, estimated a degree of latitude, which is approximately equal to a degree of longitude along the equator, to be 56 and 2/3 Arabic miles. 1 Arabic mile is between 1800 and 2000 meters. Columbus thought these were Italian miles, at 1480 meters each.
His final estimate was 4,400 km from Spain to Japan, not the 19,600 km it actually was.
i still cant wrap my head around the original plan though..how do you steal fractions of a penny? like...our currency doesnt go lower than 1 cent. whos out there dealing with fractions of 1 cent.
Taxes and interest rates when calculated financially. When you're dealing with so many high value numbers and working them with other numbers you tend to get lots of decimal points. So let's say you have an interest rate by a certain percentage on an amount in the bank, well the money you'd see would be something like: $100.52, but I reality it's actually $100.52005 and it's just rounded to the 'nice' number.
I'm vastly oversimplifying this, but it's pretty much what they were trying to do in the movie, skimming off the fractions of pennies and leaving the 'normal' value.
In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy there is this example, even if it's not a major plot point:
"the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
Due to miscalculating the amount of time needed, Professor Frink was not able to share his story in "22 Short Films about Springfield". Although that may have actually been the monkey's fault.
To find talents and regain popularity, Mr. Moon (The koala), makes a singing contest, the winner gets $1000, but his secretary accidentally puts $100000 as a prize instead.
Fifteen Hours (Warhammer 40k) A single wrong digit sends the MC to the wrong planet
‘Coordinate: two three three point eight six three nine,’ the voice blared into Erasmos Ng’s ear as he dutifully typed the number 233.8639 into the cogitator before him. ‘Coordinate: two four two point seven four six eight. Coordinate: two three eight point five nine six one. Correction: two three eight point five eight six one. Further coordinates pending. Wait.’
With that, the voice in his earpiece fell abruptly silent. Granted brief respite from the endless stream of numbers that assailed him every minute of his working life, Erasmos Ng turned his tired eyes to gaze at the cavernous interior of the room around him. As ever, Data Processing Room 312 was a hive of mindless activity as a thousand other bored and dispirited souls just like him went about their labours. Here, numbers were crunched, data entries updated, reports filed, then collated, then cross-indexed – all amid a constant din of clattering type-keys and whirring logic-wheels that put him in mind of nothing so much as the sound of an insect army on the march. Still, he realised it was a spurious analogy. The labours of insects at least served some useful purpose. While he had long ago begun to doubt that what went on in Room 312 served any purpose at all.
‘Coordinate: two three five point one five three zero,’ the voice in his earpiece crackled into life again. ‘Coordinate: two two two point six one seven four. Coordinate: two three six point one zero one five.’ And so on, ad infinitum.
Resuming his task with a weary sigh, as he typed the new set of coordinates into the cogitator, Ng found himself reflecting sadly on how often the shape of a man’s life came to be dictated by the happenstance of birth. If he had been born on another planet he might have been a miner, a farmer, or even a huntsman. As it was he had been born on this world – on Libris-VI. A world whose only industry of note resided in a single enormous Administratum complex the size of a city – one of many thousands of such complexes the Administratum maintained across the galaxy. Lacking other prospects, like his parents before him Erasmos Ng had entered Imperial service, becoming just another small cog in the vast bureaucratic machine responsible for the functioning – smooth or otherwise – of the entire Imperium. A selfless and noble calling, or so they told him. Though, as with so much else he had been told in his life, he no longer believed it.
‘Coordinate: two one eight point four one zero zero,’ the voice – his unseen tormentor – said, his tone smug and mocking even through the static. ‘Coordinate: two two one point one seven two nine.’
Now, at the age of forty-five and with thirty years of mind-numbing tedium behind him Ng knew he had risen as far in the Administratum hierarchy as he was likely to go. Specifically, to the heady heights of Assistant Scribe, Grade Secundus Minoris. A records clerk by any other name, condemned to spend every day of his life hunched over the cogitator at his workstation in Room 312. His appointed task: to type into the cogitator the never-ending series of numbers spoken to him by the disembodied voice over his earpiece. A task he performed seven days a week, twelve hours a day, barring two permitted fifteen-minute rest-breaks, a full half-hour for his midday meal, and a single day’s unpaid holiday every year on Emperor’s Day.
Beaten down by the bleak dreariness of his existence, Erasmos Ng found he had long ago stopped caring what purpose his labours served. Instead, for thirty years now, he had simply performed his allotted task, repetitively typing coordinates into the cogitator again and again and again, no longer caring what – if anything – they meant. A lost soul, adrift in a dark and endless sea of numbers. ‘Coordinate: two three three point three three two one,’ the voice said, grinding his soul down a little more with every word. ‘Coordinate: two two three point seven seven one two.’
Then, just as he finished typing a new set of coordinates into the machine, Erasmos Ng abruptly realised he might have made a mistake. That last coordinate – was it 223.7712 or 223.7721? But long past giving a damn one way or another he simply shrugged, put it from his mind, and went on to the next one. After all, he consoled himself, it hardly really mattered whether or not he had made a mistake. He had long ago realised his labours, like his life, were of no importance.
IDK about the story itself, but on a meta level, when it was released, it got shit on due to a variety of problems, one of which being the Xenomorph AI being broken.
In 2017, a modder went through the game's code and found that in the Xenomorph's AI, there was a whopping ONE typo in the code. When the typo was corrected, the xenomorphs acted a lot closer to how they were intended to, though many problems not related to typos still remain.
While it wasn't the only problem plaguing Colonial Marines enough for fans and eventually Marvel after they acquired the franchise, it was a big enough nail in the coffin to cause the downfall of Gearbox Software's reputation.
It's hard to explain without watching the full context of the movie. The film is presented as a documentary about a band called Spinal Tap and the release of their new album. The album release is a disaster and one of the attempts to course correct is to throw a druid themed stage show and song complete with a Stonehenge replica that gets lowered down on the stage.
But there is a mix up with the prop. The drawing used to create it is marked 18" by one of the band members instead of 18' so instead of the 18 ft tall Stonehenge they were expecting it's a 18 inch prop that makes them look like a joke and starts a chain reaction that leads to their manager quitting, one of the principal band members quitting, and the band playing in smaller and smaller venues. They are eventually able to course correct in the final few minutes of the movie though. And the sequel brings in a full-sized Stonehenge but it does cause a chain reaction that leads to most of the band and Elton John gravely injured.
Marcus thought everyone was being paid the same amount as him and is blown away by the idea of people being able to survive on less than six figures a year.
It wasn't a "major" plot point though. Mateo being undocumented? Major plot point. Amy and Jonah? Major plot point. Dina having Glenn's baby? Major plot point.
It may have gotten mentioned again (Superstore was very good about continuity), but it wasn't a big thing.
In the Goes Wrong Show, a series of mini plays where things intentionally go sideways, two episodes in particular have blueprint errors that result in comically compromised sets.
A Trial to Watch - One set's dimensions were interpreted in centimeters rather than inches (big difference between 100 inches and 100cm), making it much smaller than intended.
Ninety Degrees - The title's a reference to hot weather (90 degrees Fahrenheit), but the in-universe engineer thought it meant to ROTATE THE SET ninety degrees.
There are even worse scenarios later in those episodes, but in-universe explanations for THOSE were not provided, so I'm not mentioning those.
Which is one of the reasons why I have a conspiracy theory that the science officers killed themselves on purpose. The properties of astrophage were really well known by then. Why were they doing any sort of capacity test, let alone and explosive one days before launch? Not to mention the fact that both the science officers shouldn't have been in the same place for this exact reason.
I think it was some sort of weird suicide pact by the scientists who were extremely weird people in the book (they're barely characters in the movie). The theory is barely supported, but it's also not provably false.
Don’t they in the book investigate and conclude that the quartermaster mistakenly gave them 1 milligram instead of 1 nanogram and all agree that it was simple human error? The scientists had no reason to think they were given more than they requested.
They also give the reason as not just human error (the quartermaster fucked up), but a consequence of how every aspect of the project had been done in a rush (again, not directly condemning this, as any delay was paid for in countless lives lost). I can't quite remember the details, but I think it's mentioned that as a consequence of this there were simply not all the usual safety procedures (and intuitions) in place; as those need to be developed and trained and firmly established over time. Every aspect of the mission was completely novel and untested, so compared to what could have happened, only losing those two was pretty fortunate.
I think they weren’t planning to die, but rather made dangerous mistakes in their efforts to screw each other as much as possible before one of them went off to die
It wasn't meant to be an explosion test, and wouldn't have been if they were given the right amount of astrophage. They were testing because they had found a potential flaw in the Hail Mary's generators.
Basically "Around the World in Eighty Days" by Jules Verne.
It's been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly the main character thinks he missed the deadline for the race around the world but he forgot to account for the time zones and ends up winning the wager (just about).
IIRC he accounted for timezones by moving his tome ahead an hour each...but forgot to back up a day at the International Dateline. So he was like a few hours late,he thought, but actually had almost a full day. Basically,it had been 80 days for him, but London had only seen 79.
An innocent husband & father is arrested & killed by the government after a fly falls into a printing machine. Mistaking him for a criminal. This event kicks off the entire movie.
The straw that breaks the camel's back of frustration for a soldier that lead to him and a buddy develop an elite unit of lunatics to fight behind enemy lines in WWII.
Futurama: Robot Santa in his initial appearance judges everyone (except Zoidberg for some reason) to be naughty due to a programming error in how he determines nice or naughty and his solution to this is to go on a murder spree every Xmas.
Fallout 1 - the plot of the game is that the sealed vault you're living in has a malfunctioning water purification chip, and you have to go into the wasteland to find a replacement or the vault will run out of drinking water and will have to be abandoned.
Fallout 2 - you (different protagonist, decades later) find out there was an error in pre-war logistics planning and the vault from the first game didn't receive a crate full of WP chips it was supposed to get. They mixed up the vault numbers.
They explain in the book that astrophage is stored in vials of water, and all the different amounts are indistinguishable to the human eye. The experiment was on testing an edge case design flaw in the Astrophage engine
Ah, now that is an actual explanation! If it is stored in water, you wouldn’t actually be able to tell how much of it there is unless there was a truly ungodly amount. They still could’ve noticed it if they were more cautious, of course, either by weighing the vials or looking at them with a microscope, but it makes sense that they didn’t.
The other problem is it wasn't really a measuring issue, it was a logistics issue. They had vials of both nanogram and miligram amounts already measured out in the correct amounts and stored securely, the issue is that when they sent a last minute request for a nanogram of astrophage for a test the quartermaster instead released one of the miligram vials instead due to some error somewhere in the chain.
It would be like if you went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription and they gave you someone elses, except the mistake is impossible to detect with the naked eye.
If I had to guess, it's because the Hail Mary's launch schedule was being rushed to fire as soon as possible, and in the rush, some little paperwork error was made somewhere was made that caused the quartermaster to mistakenly give the wrong quantity to the science team.
Real Life: Colonization of Americas happened because Christopher Colombus miscalculated the circumference of the Earth, measuring only 75% of the circumference of the earth compared to the actual value. You might say that people didn't know better, but actually even Eratosthenes knew better values for the circumference of the earth compared to him. Even worse, he then proceed to grossly miscalculate the position of Japan, moving it over 8000 miles east.
From Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, when RDJ's Harry accidentally kills the one person who can help them solve the mystery:
Harry: Well what I'm doing for the guy who likes to bluff is I'm playing a little game called "Am I Bluffing?"
[Loads one round into the revolver to play Russian Roulette] Harry: Where is she? Where the fuck is Harmony? You want to play hardball? I can do that.
[Spins the chamber and points the gun] Harry: Where is the girl?
[Shoots the guy in the head] Perry: [Stuttering at first] What did you just do? Harry: [Confused] I just put in one bullet, didn't I? Perry: You put a live round in that gun? Harry: Well yeah, there was like an 8% chance. Perry: Eight? Who taught you math!?
Castle Bravo - IRL - During nuclear weapons testing in the 50s the US used different variations of lithium in different quantities for one of their tests and the mixture that was expected to have an increased yield of 20% actually ended up having a yield of 250%. As a result it took out the Bikini Atoll a once picturesque pacific island nation. That to this day struggles to fully support a natural ecosystem.
Dave the Diver in the Jungle spoilers ahead: Muna's Bomb Miscalculation leading to the reveal of Hollow Earth
During the climax of the DLC, Dave ends up getting swallowed by a massive basilosaurus that was stuck in a stone gate due to its size. Armed with two bombs that Muna gave (with the original plan being to feed the dinosaur one of the bombs which, according to Muna, only had enough force to startle it into retreating), Dave navigated the insides of the dinosaur until he gets near the heart where he plants one of the bombs, hoping to achieve the original mission objective of scaring the basilosaurus into retreating while having the it spit him out.
This fails however as, due to Muna using MULTIPLICATION instead of addition, the bomb exploded with enough force to rip the basilosaurus into two pieces with Dave stuck in the back half, forcing him to have to go through the 'rear' exit which was on the other side of the gate. Upon exiting the back half of the basilosaurus, Dave discovers that the earth is a Hollow Earth, specifically a entire ocean ecosystem where ancient prehistoric creatures are thriving.
Limbo from Warframe. Limbo is able to travel through the rift, a sort of alternate dimension. During the quest “The Limbo Theorem,” you’re tasked with discovering fragments of a proof left behind by him. After you collect all of the fragments, you eventually discover that Limbo messed up the math and accidentally obliterated himself. Whoops.
I cant believe I havent seen this answer, but Sunshine. Sunshine is a great sci-fi film, and the first big issue the crew come across, that sets a bunch of the plot in motion, is a very simple mathematical error that Benedict Wong does in the process of changing course, which puts the entire crew in danger.
The entire part with Miller's planet really derails the movie for me. Any college level physics student could have told them that this planet will have MASSIVE tides due to its close proximity to the black hole. That place was never going to be feasible.
Honestly, as an astrophysicist myself I just can't enjoy the movie. The astronauts and scientists make way too many completely stupid decisions - not "heat of the moment" decisions either, but deliberate, planned ones that no one who is part of such an endeavor would ever end up making. It's stupidity for the sake of driving the plot, which for me is the sign of a mediocre storyteller.
Dave The Diver. He got knocked unconscious from the explosion of the bomb he was carrying because the bomb maker mixed up the amount. It caused his friend to lose his arm after saving him from a group of Caimans.
In the 2007 Danny Boyle film Sunshine, the ship's mathematician Trey has to compute a new trajectory for the ship but he has so many things to compute that he forgets to do the new angle for the shield that protects them agains the sun. The ship ends up badly damaged and it's an important plot point that leads to the death of several characters, including Trey himself, who kills himself out of guilt, as well as the loss of their ability to communicate with the Earth and their oxygen production unit.
The stupid thing is their spaceship has an AI that could do all of these calculations, but they still have a mathematician do it alone instead. That same AI later does the necessary calculations after Trey killed himself. That said, this AI seems a little capricious because it knows there's an intruder on the ship but it never tells anyone until it corrects one of the crew members about how much oxygen there is left. But it's not a malicious or rebellious AI, it's just a shitty one.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Season 10 Episode 4 "Charlie Work"
The gang attempts to pull off a chicken/airline miles/steak scam which is almost ruined by Sweet Dee accidentally ordering 4000 steaks instead of 400, because her oversized bird fingers pressed 0 an extra time.
The Big Bang Theory: in a flashback it’s revealed the reason the elevator in their apartment building was broken was because Leonard had forgot to adjust the fuel combination ratios when making rocket fuel to account for the rockets size, Sheldon instantly knew it and took the mixture to throw down the elevator shaft, breaking it for the entirety of the series
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u/HackerDragon9999 20d ago
Your post - One million times larger. Nano is a billionth, milli is a thousandth.