70 Percent of a Blog Post

Nashville's mayor has just announced that, due to increasing water supplies, citizens can now return to 70 percent of water consumption that they maintained before the flood. This is great news! But for the non-mathematically inclined, it's also a nightmare.

For starters, who remembers how much water they used 2 weeks ago? And even if one does, how does one go about calculating something like this? Does anyone have an intuitive sense of what 70 percent of anything is? If so, can I borrow it? The prior edict, 50 percent, was easy. You just shower every other day, flush the toilet every other time and alternate hand sanitizer with soap and water. 70 percent is much harder. Do my former 12-minute showers now beome 8.4-minute showers? If so, how do I go about picking which 30 percent of myself not to wash on a given day? Instead of putting a stopwatch in the bathroom, can I just shower 7 days out of ten instead? If so, can I go ahead and shower for the first 7 days and hope the conservation order is over by then?

Whatever the answer, at least showering is a once-a-day activity that's easy to keep tabs on. I'm going to need to put a chart beside the toilet and sink to map out 70% of my prior usage of those (3 out of 10 times, I guess I just have to hold it).

Other mathematical mysteries arise: Can I wash 70 percent of my clothes, or should I just re-wear the same clothes 30 percent more often than I normally would? When I'm ready to do laundry, should I leave 3 out of 10 items in the dirty pile, given that different size of each item might screw up the math, or should I just wash 70 percent of each and every garment to ensure mathematical certainty? If I'm washing 70 percent of my car, can I round up to 75 so I clean 3 of my tires, or must I round down to 50 and clean only 2?

Mysteries abound. And don't even get me started on the dishes, which can now get 70 percent of a rinse before going in the dishwasher. Or maybe they get a full rinse and only 70 percent of a wash cycle. Or mabye its both. I'm not sure how the math works.

I would take the time to figure it out, but I'm 70 percent sure I should get back to work...