Mon - March 24, 2003

Bad Graphs



This page shows an error that Adobe can't be very proud of. Can you spot the error?



My son Staffan was asking me for some addition problems a few months ago. I gave him a CD with 5 songs on it and asked him to add up the times of all the tracks on it. After about two minutes he came back to me and complained: "Daddy -- this problem has a problem. If I follow the instructions, it gets all wrong. See, I added up the numbers in the tens column and I get an 8, which is strange because the total time shouldn't be 14 minutes and 83 seconds, because thats more than a minute. The answer is really 15 minutes and 23 seconds."

I showed him this graph and asked him what the numbers on the bottom meant. After a minute, he said "Heyyy, there's something missing somewhere". He's 5. Someone at Adobe is ought to be really embarrassed.

Posted: March 24, 2003 0:0   Big Box of Paints   Mac   Email Comments

© Olof Hellman