The University of California gets this math problem wrong

U.S. colleges are required by law to post a "net price calculator" on their websites to help prospective students and their parents estimate the true cost of attendance once financial aid is factored in. The calculators ask for information on a family's finances (you can do it anonymously) and household size so the college can produce a realistic estimate of costs.

But the calculators at five University of California schools include an incorrectly worded question that prevents users from getting an accurate estimate -- or any estimate at all.

The calculator at UC Berkeley, for instance, asks the user for "Number in college." When you move your mouse over the question for more information, it explains, "Total number of people in your household that were in college during the last academic year, including your Parent(s)."

For many families -- such as those who are getting ready to send their eldest child to college -- the answer to that question will be zero. But if you enter 0, you get an error message: "'Number in College' must be greater than zero."

Huh? Why can't you enter zero when that's the accurate answer?

Here's why: The question is worded wrong. It should ask how many people in the household will be in college next year. At that point, you would theoretically have at least one person -- your freshman student -- in college. But the question doesn't ask that.

Berkeley isn't the only UC campus to get this wrong. It's also wrong at the calculators offered by UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, UC Merced and UC Irvine.

While many families will get an error message, they at least will realize at that point that something's wrong with the calculator. But families who already have a child in college and who follow the calculator's instructions will end up with a misleading number and may not know it.

Let's say the oldest child in the family is already in college and the parents are preparing to send off their second oldest. If the parents reply to the question "Total number of people in your household that were in college during the last academic year, including your Parent(s)" by honestly saying "1" (when they really should say "2"), they will get an inaccurate estimate. That's not a small problem: It could influence where the second child goes to college.

UPDATE, Oct. 7, 2019: UC Santa Cruz has corrected the wording on its page. The other four UCs, however, still have it wrong. 

UPDATE, Oct. 12, 2022: UC San Diego, UC Merced, and UC Irvine all use the same calculator with the same incorrect wording. UC Berkeley moved its calculator to a different page. But it's still wrong.  

This New York Times advice doesn't wash

The New York Times recently fell into a trap set by the commercial car wash industry. It is a trap that has ensnared many lesser publications, but you expect the NYT to be more careful.

In an article titled "One Thing You Can Do: Opt for the Carwash," the Times said that commercial car washes are kinder to the environment than a home car wash because they use less water. The story says that a driveway car wash "can quickly rack up 100 gallons of water or more." Commercial car washes, the article assures us, use less.

And what is the source of the numbers used in this comparison? Um, it's the commercial car wash industry itself, hardly an unbiased party in this debate. Yet the Times uses the industry's numbers without even a hint of skepticism.

The fact is that the 100 gallons figure is just flat wrong, and the Times could have easily found that out with a tiny bit of research, as I told the story's author, Jillian Mock, in an email:

Dear Ms. Mock:

I wish you had run your article by the New York Times' fact checkers before publication. The notion that home car washes use 100+ gallons is a long-discredited myth perpetuated by the commercial car wash industry. 

Way back in 2012, for example, Politifact put the idea to the test and found it took a mere 11 gallons to wash a car at home. 

You can easily test this yourself, as I did one day with my and my wife's cars.

First, I determined my hose's flow rate by timing how long it took to fill a one-gallon milk jug. Time: 7.37 seconds.

Then I measured how much water it took to fill the bucket. Total: 2 gallons.

The final step was to time how long it took to pre-rinse and post-rinse each car. Then add up the total number of seconds and divide by 7.37. Since my wife and I have two cars, I was able to basically run the experiment twice. Here are the results:

	Pre-rinse (seconds)	Post-rinse (seconds)	Total rinse time	Gallons (total rinse time/7.37)	Add 2 gallons used for bucket	Total gallons used
Toyota	41	48	89	12.08	2	14.08
Hyundai	47	41	88	11.94	2	13.94

As you can see, each car wash used about 14 gallons total, not even close to the 110 gallons mentioned in your story. (To be clear, it's best to take a moment before starting to think about how to rinse your car all the way around without backtracking. If you spray back and forth covering the same parts of the car more than once, you will obviously use more water. Still, you would have to be extremely careless to hit the 100-gallon mark.)

As far as runoff, there are ways to limit, or even eliminate, this at home. First, you can use biodegradable, non-phosphate car wash soap. You also can do as some of my neighbors' do - wash the car on the front lawn. Not only does this prevent runoff, it has the bonus effect of allowing the overspray of water to help irrigate your lawn. 

My wife and I can't do this because we long ago replaced our lawn with low-water-use plants. So when I wash our cars, I put down an old rolled up sheet to redirect any runoff (there isn't much since we're conscious of our use). The extra water flows onto a patch of grass by the curb. 

So while commercial car washes may claim to send contaminant-laden water to treatment facilities, smart home washers prevent those contaminants from entering the water system in the first place.

One last thing: Simply by choosing to stay home and not to drive to the car wash, you're lowering your carbon footprint. 

The unfortunate conclusion from all this is that the New York Times gave readers precisely the wrong advice. If you want to be kind to the environment, stay away from the commercial car wash and instead wash your car thoughfully at home.

Book review: "Idea Man" by Paul Allen

Paul Allen lived the dream.

As a college student in the 1970s, Allen teamed up with his former high school colleague Bill Gates to  create the first microcomputer operating system and found a company they originally called "Micro-Soft."

For eight intense years, Allen worked with Gates to build the business into a technology powerhouse that would soon rank as one of the largest companies in the world. And then he stepped away and essentially,retired at age 29. His shares in Microsoft would make him a multi-billionaire, and for the rest of his life -- he died at 65 in 2018 -- Allen had the special privilege to spend money on almost anything he wanted.

This is the story told in Allen's 2011 autobiography, "Idea Man," a book that is mostly fascinating, but sometimes dull.

"Idea Man" is almost two separate books. The first half, dedicated to Allen's early life, and the birth and growth of Microsoft, is the part most worth reading.

I like reading "origin" stories that show the steps that led to big things. For Allen, one of the biggest breaks he got was his parents' decision to stretch their budget and put him in the private Lakeside School in Seattle. This was the late 1960s and early '70s and the school had a computer club that introduced Allen to the primitive programming languages of the day.

Allen insists that he wasn't a nerd -- he was interested in the rock music of Jimi Hendrix, for example -- but as he describes his interest in computers, robotics, brain science and space exploration, you might conclude otherwise.

It was in Lakeside's computer club that Allen met Gates, two years his junior, and found that they shared a almost insatiable interest in programming. Through an arrangement between the school and a local business they got crucial time to spend crafting their skills on a mainframe computer, the only option in those pre-PC days.

The release of the Altair, the first personal computer (though incredibly crude by today's standards), sparked Allen and Gates to build their first operating system and soon Microsoft was off and running.

I was particularly intrigued by Allen's depictions of his relationship with Gates. While both were talented programmers, Allen was more fascinated with the technical aspects while Gates pushed to make money off their skills. Gates often could be a bully with an explosive temper, Allen writes.

Tensions between them built over the years. At one point, Gates told Allen that he because he had worked hard on one particular project he wanted to alter their 50-50 split to 60-40 in his favor. Allen agreed. Later, Gates pushed to make it 64-36. But when Allen completed a hard project and asked for a shift in his direction, Gates refused to budge.

"In that moment, something died for me," Allen wrote. "I'd thought that our partnership was based on fairness, but now I saw that Bill's self-interest overrode all other concerns."

In 1982, while Allen was being treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma, he said he caught Gates and company president Steve Ballmer conspiring to reduce his ownership of Microsoft. Soon after, Allen resigned.

The second half of the book is devoted to Allen's post-Microsoft life and it would be easy to become jealous here. Many of us, watching the latest lottery super-jackpot, have pondered what we would do if we were a zillionaire. Allen actually got to live that, investing his time and energy in a wide range of endeavors from technology to sports to brain science.

"Some people are motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal," he wrote. "I start from a different place, from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead."

This section of the book is less interesting than the first, in part because it's hard to match the intensity of the Microsoft creation story but also because Allen is less directly involved in the projects he describes. For example, he goes into much detail about SpaceShipOne, an effort he funded to send a plane-like vehicle into space. But he is mostly an observer, so the story is less engaging.

He also goes on too long with a dry story about a poor investment in Charter Cable.

Still, there are surprises here. He delights in his ownership of the Portland Trailblazers professional basketball team, even getting involved in the selection of particular players (he is more hands-off with his ownership of the football Seattle Seahawks).

Then there's his yacht. Despite his wealth, he said he long had no interest in acquiring a yacht, which he associated with "a society of snobs." But eventually he was persuaded to first rent, then buy, a large vessel to explore parts of the planet and indulge in his passion for scuba diving.

Later he ended up with a custom-built 414-foot yacht -- the fourth largest at that time in the world. The yacht even had an eight-person submarine that launched from an internal lagoon on the boat. Maybe you'd do the same if you were a zillionaire.