Multiplication mitigates minute measuring mistake

When I made a piece of outdoor furniture that featured closely spaced slats, I ran into trouble spacing out the slats. A tiny error in the width of my spacers, multiplied by each piece, threw the layout way off. Because the margin of error was so small, it made it hard to measure precisely, so I turned the power of multiplication back against the problem. Aligning six of the spacers together edge-to-edge made the error easy to measure with my calipers. Then I divided the accumulated error by 6 and resized the spacers to compensate for the error. Now the slats fit perfectly.
—Erv Roberts, Des Moines, Iowa