Quotes / Writers Cannot Do Math

Film — Live-Action

Number 2: Why not use your knowledge of the future to play the stock market? We could make trillions!
Dr. Evil: Why make trillions when we could make... billions?
Scott Evil: A trillion is more than a billion, numbnuts.

— Austin Powers in Goldmember

Live-Action TV

Every year, worldwide, some 3,000 people are killed by falling coconuts, now if you times that figure by 10, that's 30,000 people every year, which works out at nearly half a million people, every 12 months. Spread that out over a year, that's 4.2 billion people killed by coconuts every month. A frightening statistic.

— Angus Deaton, Would I Lie to You?

Magazines

Vader: Work on this new Death Star is not proceeding fast enough!
Admiral: But my men are already working 14 hours a day!
Vader: Well, then double your efforts!
Admiral: You mean work 28 hours a day!?
Vader: Look, I'm a sadist, not a mathematician!

—MAD parody of Return of the Jedi

Web Original

'Spindly' Klutz might have the stupidest origin story in the history of comic books. He wasn't good at football, so they only let him play half the time. This drove him to revenge. What makes football a strange choice for his origin is that there are offensive and defensive squads on each team. So basically, the author picked the one sport where every player only plays half the time.

—Seanbaby "The 6 Craziest Villains Ever Defeated by Snack Cakes"

When Bison opens up the huge suitcase of money, it's filled to the brim with phony red cash with Raul Julia's face smack-dab in the middle. Sagat's all 'WTF man! Is this a joke?' 'On the contrary!' Bison winks, 'Every Bison Dollar will be worth FIVE British pounds!' Dang! That's a stiff rate of exchange. Is he planning to issue any Bison Quarters?

—Noah Antwiler on Street Fighter

Chris: This movie has a hard time understanding how light works. Case in point: The crazy “light bomb” that Blade sets off to kill all the reapers, which involves light traveling around corners and people ducking after they see it so that they don’t get hit by it. One more time for those of you in the back: They see it, but then duck out of the way. And we are talking about LIGHT.
David: You can only fit so much light into one room, Chris. The light will leak out, around corners.
Chris: It’s seriously like one energy bar away from being a Mega Man weapon.
David: Remember, the amount of light that can fit in a three-dimensional space has an equation: f(Light) = 4Light^3 / 2 + c, where c is the base temperature. When you overshoot that, it’s all over.
Chris: Seems legit.

—ComicsAlliance on Blade II

Crewman: The Scimitar is spreading its "targeting wings".
Picard: Targeting wings? It needs fancy targeting wings to hit something bigger than an aircraft carrier from only 1 km away, dead ahead?
Crewman: Yup. And it needs to charge up for 7 minutes too.
Picard: Excellent. Just enough time for another contrived action scene. Hey, if it takes 7 minutes to charge up to kill 1000 people, how long would it take to kill 6 billion?
Crewman: I'd calculate about 80 years. Who the hell wrote this?
Picard: Thank God I signed up for X-Men.

—Michael Wong on Star Trek: Nemesis

One episode's big villain is an immortal who has figured out a mathematical algorithm that takes all the immortals in the world and tells him who he needs to kill and in what order to become the last one. Yeah…there’s a guy whose big schtick is that he plays the fantasy football version of immortality. Forget the fact that no one can calculate how a swordfight to the death is going to turn out due to all the variables involved.

—The Screamsheet on Highlander: The Raven

The launch of the Saturn V rocket was measured at 220 db, which, from what I’ve read, is loud enough to literally melt concrete.

Batman’s sonic attack in this episode is, according to the narration, twenty thousand decibels.

Amazingly, this bit of overkill doesn’t completely obliterate Gotham City and/or the planet Earth, instead just driving the tiger back and leaving Batman himself completely unharmed. All things considered, it’s a pretty fantastic advertisement for Wayne Industries Brand Ear Plugs™.

—Chris Sims on Batman (1966), "Better Luck Next Time"^note Sound can't go above 194 db at normal air pressures on earth. Above that, it's just shockwaves, not actually "sound."

Chloe then goes from Smallville all the way to Metropolis, where she fetches a tazer and finds Lana, who's also gone from Metropolis to Smallville to Metropolis (and then later back to Smallville, to passive aggressively chide Clark). Lex has, of course, gone from Smallville to Metropolis at this point, as has Clark, who meets them all there.

No wonder we need the Saudis.

—Neal Bailey on Smallville ("Tomb")

Web Video

"If it takes a millennium to boil you away,
That's .00083 percent in a day
And not that I'm now suggesting you try it,
But you lose pounds faster on the Atkin's Diet
You do get dissolved, that seems pretty plain,
But it happens too slowly to cause any pain
What was sold as a torture unspeakably cruel
Becomes a long dip in a big heated pool"

— Ben Croshaw, Sarlaac is Such Sweet Sorrow

This dude, who was banished from The Triad club way back when, sends his minions to warn the Charmed Ones about the others. And wait— why was there a fourth guy in The Triad? Wouldn't that make them The Quartet? Unless they just rotate members out; then of course there wouldn't be a way to 'vanquish' them. They're just three random shitters... That's like saying you 'can't vanquish' the Harlem Globetrotters.

—Allison Pregler on Charmed Season Eight

"At this point, most of us learn the basics of electro-magnetic spectrum somewhere in middle school. You got that little zone of visible light and then a huge amount of radiation our eyes can't percieve, from gamma rays up thought radio waves. Since we can only see a thin slice of the spectrum, our concept of color is very limited compared to the full spectrum of light, but that's what we're stuck with. But if you told Lovecraft about the wide spectrum of light humans can't see, he'd get a funny look on his face, say something like "You mean there is colors that man has never seen? WHAT MAY THEY BE CAPABLE OF!?" and go write "The Colour Out of Space", a story about a color of demonstrably visible light, that is nonetheless nowhere on the visible spectrum. This is what happens when you "don't have the constitution for maths"."

— Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions on H.P. Lovecraft.

Western Animation

Homer Simpson: (after putting on a pair of glasses) The sum of the square root of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.
Random Guy In Bathroom Stall: That's a right triangle, you idiot!
Homer Simpson: D'oh!

— The Simpsons

Real Life

Oh dear, maths.

— J. K. Rowling

I suck at math.

— Joss Whedon

I’ve put hundreds of thousands if not millions of hours into my weapons training.

—Steven Seagal

I'm a science fiction writer. I can't count.

— Douglas Adams

"At the Collège he became a highly successful student, heading his class in all subjects except mathematics and the sciences."

— The Wikipedia page for Arthur Rimbaud

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