Thursday, May 17, 2007

Close enough to perfect?



In a column I wrote Sunday for Mother’s Day, I interviewed a 57-year-old woman who was searching for her birth mother.
She had been adopted and raised by a family in Macon, and had a “stepsister’’ who was 8 years older. Six month ago, she had a DNA test which revealed her stepsister was actually her half-sister. The test concluded the two women had the same father.
She said the test was 99.9 percent positive.
I don’t know if I should ever take 99.9 percent as conclusive. I guess there is always that small fraction of a chance.
But she felt pretty certain about it, and I did, too.
The day after the column was published, I happened to come across something I had saved from several years ago called “If 99.9 Percent Is Good Enough …” I don’t know the source, but I found it pretty interesting.
If 99.9 percent is good enough, then …
  • 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

  • 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled every hour.

  • 2 million documents will be lost by the IRS this year.

  • 2.5 million books will be shipped with the wrong covers.

  • 315 entries in Webster's dictionary will be misspelled.

  • 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written this year.

  • 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrectcardholder information on their magnetic strips.

  • 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly during the year.

  • 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

That will now make me really iffi about 99.9%!! If it is not 100% I won't nothing to do with it! Thanks Mr. Grismore! LOL
HN

10:37 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

99.9 isn't good enough for everything. But it is probably good enough when establishing paternity.

12:14 PM  

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