Thursday, January 26, 2012

If You're Still Interested ...

(Click on the cartoon to see the full image.)

(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

Anyway, the problem posed in the previous picture had an incorrect solution. Mike inadvertantly used phi instead of phi % when solving his imaginary interest inquiry.

The actual result was a loss of about 1% of 1% of your original principal, which is better than many mutual funds performed in the past year. However, you would have picked up only an imaginary nickel, rather than a few imaginary dollars.

Special thanks to "anonymous" for running the numbers. I don't have the budget for a staff of fact checkers around here. And, oddly enough, although I managed to get the correct solution out of wolframalpha after the mistake was first pointed out to me, it took about five tries to get the equation entered correctly when I wanted to write this entry. Too many divisions and parentheses!

Oh, and ....
I meant to do that.
Yeah, that's the ticket.




3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So would you please present the original and new equation with an explanation of the variables and the answer? Thanks!

(x, why?) said...

Is this the same Anonymous from yesterday?

You have the equation for compound interest with the four special numbers in it.

Use Google calculator with this:
pi(1+phi/100/e)^(e i)

Or on WolframAlpha, use this:
pi(1+(1+sqrt(5))/2/100/e)^(e i)

because "phi" uses a different meaning.

GregT said...

Phi on them. Brilliant recovery though, title and all.