Years ago, we didn’t have gadgets telling us how full something was or how hot the day was. We simply noticed it ourselves or realized how much we were sweating. Nowadays, we have gauges and buttons that modernize our lives, making us a bit too dependent on them.
Many of these gadgets are inaccurate or are even deliberately made to lie to and appease us. Let’s take a look at the eight gadgets that fabricate information to us daily:
1. Fuel gauges
We’ve been taught that the gas tank is 100% full when the needle is pointing to the “F” and completely empty when all the way at the bottom. However, you may have noticed that for the first 50 miles or so, the needle hardly moves down at all, but when you get down to the last bit of gas, it goes down to empty very quickly. After you fill it up, you find out that you still had well over a gallon left.
The primary reason for this is due to the float used to measure your gas level, which is a bulb on an arm, similar to the one in your toilet tank. Bulbs will always be wider than the arm, making it possible to go from full (float is completely submerged) to a little less full (float is floating on the surface but touching the top of the tank) without moving the arm.
For the exact opposite reason, you can go from almost empty to empty without the arm moving. And since your fuel needle is going to be in the same place for both full and slightly less full, the engineers chose to point it to full.
2. Elevator and crosswalk buttons
With so many things we have to wait for in our everyday lives — traffic lights, customer service, long lines — it’s reassuring to know we have control over some aspects like closing the elevator door. However, in most cases, the elevator “door close” buttons do nothing. According to 47-year-old elevator maintenance veteran John Menville, the “door close” button is just there to give people the illusion of control.
Firefighters and other emergency personnel do have access to the button when they use their key, but if you’re not saving people from a burning building, then you are most likely out of luck.
The same can be said about crosswalk buttons and timed traffic lights like the ones in busy areas. The light changes every two minutes regardless, so pushing the button does not enable it to switch any faster. Several traffic lights are sensor-driven, especially ones in the suburbs, to the point where the light for the smaller side street never actually turns green unless something triggers it like a car or pedestrian.
3. Scales
An American study of scales at the University of North Carolina found that 20% of the devices tend to be off. This can be scary when doctors need to calculate a patient’s dosage of something according to their weight. A 4-year-old cancer patient was in fact measured inaccurately and would have received an excessive dose of radiation had someone not noticed the mistake at the last minute.
Even when inaccurate scales aren’t nearly killing people, they are cheating them out of millions of dollars. People complain about inaccurate firewood weighings, and inspectors have found 90% of these complaints to be true.
Another questionable scale is the one located in airports. If your bag is over by a certain weight, you’ll end up paying more. Inspections found that a number of inaccurate scales are located in a variety of airports, including one-third of the scales at the Long Beach Airport and over half of the U.S. Airways scales in Phoenix.
4. Office thermostats
Of all workplace conflicts that people talk about, the thermostat issue may take the cake as being the most prevalent. Most women are too cold, while most men are too hot. Some may sneak up and turn the thermostat up or down, which would wear out the building’s HVAC system in a day if the thermostat actually did anything.
Building facilities know better than to trust employees with those type of controls. Ninety percent of office thermostats do absolutely nothing, and 51 out of 70 industry newsletter respondents said they personally had installed a fake thermostat.
5. GPS navigation
If you simply used a GPS to tell you where you are, there would be no issue. Many devices are accurate within one meter. Unfortunately, most of us use GPS systems to tell us where to go, and programs aren’t always smart enough to account for construction or cliff roads or other human elements.
Technology can’t do anything for users if the map it’s given to read is wrong. Not all map companies are sending people out to drive and check every single road they’re feeding into the computer. This is especially true for rural and less-traveled areas, where there are a ton of nonexistent roads sitting in the computer just waiting to be traveled by some unfortunate soul.
6. Speedometers
We rely on our car speedometer, especially to avoid driving over the speed limit, endangering others and ourselves, and being caught by police. The bad news is that your speedometer is likely lying to you, but the good news is that it’s probably on the side of caution. If you’re going 70 mph, the average speedometer will read 71.37.
The worst-case scenario is that if you were driving on bald tires (2%), with your tire pressure off by 5 psi (1%), with the maximum error allowed by U.S. regulations (4%), in a Midwest winter (2%), and your alternator was malfunctioning (1%), your speedometer could be off by 10%, or 7 mph, if you were driving 70. But then again, there will be no legal trouble with your speedometer being too fast.
7. Blood pressure cuffs
Those who go to the doctor regularly know that it entails a nurse taking your blood pressure beforehand. For young people, it may not matter so much, but for many patients, that number is critical.
It’s disturbing to know that 30% to 40% of blood pressure cuffs are wrong by 4 mm Hg (pressure units) or more, and 10% are off by 10 mm Hg or more. Misreadings off by just 5 mm Hg could double the amount of patients being treated for high blood pressure, meaning some people would be taking unnecessary pills and possibly suffering side effects.
8. Cell phones
Cell phones often lie about two things: battery life and service. The primary issue is that most cell phone batteries are never kept at “100%” charge because bringing it to that can do long-term damage to the battery. Rather, phones are made to charge up to 100% and then let the battery drain up to 10%, and it will “rest” in that state until taken off the charger.
The phone will say 100% when you take it off the charger and will quietly pretend the battery is draining over the next few minutes until it reaches 95% or whatever charge the phone is really at.
Another feature that is lying to you is the cell phone “bars” that indicate signal strength. In many cases, the bars have nothing to do with signal quality. PC World tested cell phone service in 13 cities and found that only one city (Phoenix) showed a correlation between bars and service quality. In San Francisco, only 13% of test calls indicated any relationship between bars and quality.
To see how great your signal is, look for a number called EC/10. While the bars tell you how much signal you’re getting, the EC/10 number lets you know how much is actually usable. It’s not displayed on your device because it changes so often, never giving an actual solid reading. It’s also important to note that bars tell you how well you’re receiving signal from the tower, but not how well the reverse link (who you’re communicating with) is.
Source: Cracked
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