WW and OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Question

From the article "Elon Musk's Appetite for Destruction" (archived version for posterity), published January 17, 2023 on the web and slated for publication in the January 22 issue of the New York Times Magazine:

Slavik sent me one of the complaints he filed against Tesla, which lists prominent Autopilot crashes from A to Z — in fact, from A to WW. In China, a Tesla slammed into the back of a street sweeper. In Florida, a Tesla hit a tractor-trailer that was stretched across two lanes of a highway. During a downpour in Indiana, a Tesla Model 3 hydroplaned off the road and burst into flames. In the Florida Keys, a Model S drove through an intersection and killed a pedestrian. In New York, a Model Y struck a man who was changing his tire on the shoulder of the Long Island Expressway. In Montana, a Tesla steered unexpectedly into a highway barrier. Then the same thing happened in Dallas and in Mountain View and in San Jose.

Later in the article:

That is the argument that Tesla has to make to the public and to juries this spring. In the words of the company’s safety report: “While no car can prevent all accidents, we work every day to try to make them much less likely to occur.” Autopilot may cause a crash WW times, but without that technology, we’d be at OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

(emphasis added in both excerpts). What in the world do "WW" and "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" mean in this context? In the first excerpt, "WW" seems to be a play on "A to Z," but in the second, it appears to represent a number--and God only knows how "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" figures in. My working hypothesis is that these were intended to be placeholders for other values, but it's hard to understand how they survived the editing process, to say nothing of the fact that the article has been online for three days now without changes. Any insights?

Answer 1

Donald Slavik is a lawyer. He has exhibits A-Z, and even more exhibits after that: AA, AB, and so on, ending at WW (621). As you would expect, "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" is an obscenely large number (about 4.6 times 10^26 or 459_880_359_120_217_134_284_773_785 — see this code for conversion).

Many paralegals know the correct way to assign letters for exhibits. The first 26 exhibits are easy, EX-A through EX-Z, and the next exhibit is also usually correct, EX-AA, but it’s after that where things can go awry. The 28th exhibit should be EX-AB (not EX-BB) followed by EX-AC, EX-AD, EX-AE, EX-AF and so on. — Lit Software

Spreadsheet software like Excel also uses letters like this for column names, known as A1 reference style. However, I ruled this out because it would be very unusual to store records "vertically" instead of in rows (and in fact would be impossible in older versions of Excel due to having a limited number of columns).

Answer 2

Slavik is saying that someone sent him a list of 26 crashes, labeled A to Z. He then corrects himself and says A - WW, meaning there were 26 + 23 = 49 reports: A, B, C, ..., Z, AA, BB, CC, ..., WW. This is apparently blamed on autopilot.

He then makes the argument that there would be some extraordinarily long list up to OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, which is hundreds of crashes, if cars did not have autopilot. Presumably he is referring to the fact that car crashes are not new, and that humans driving without autopilot would have been in hundreds of crashes. This argues that autopilot has prevented far more crashes than it has caused.

EDIT:

To clear up an error in the comments: The lettering of exhibits is NOT required to be A, B, ..., Z, AA, AB, ..., AZ, BA, etc. There is legal software that extols that system as a feature. However, certain courts mandate AA, BB, CC, ..., ZZ, AAA, BBB, etc., as described in the answer. For instance, New Hampshire court "Procedure for Marking Exhibits" states:

If total number of exhibits does not exceed 78 (three times through the alphabet): Defendant's exhibits shall be marked alphabetically in sequence and commencing with the letter A. After the alphabet has been used, begin with AA, BB, etc., followed by AAA, BBB, etc., for the third time through. If total number exceeds 78: Defendant's exhibits shall be marked numerically.

NHD

Answer 3

This is a reference to column name patterns in MS Excel. (edit: I now understand there is an alternative, more contextually-appropriate use for the same system—see below) In Excel, new columns are named by letters by default, and there are only 26 letters in the Roman alphabet, so after column “Z” comes “AA”, then “AB”, etc. It’s a kind of pseudo-base-26 number system. The author earlier stated that they were shown a list of incidents “from A to Z, or rather, A to WW”, meaning that the list went through A-Z, then through AA-AZ, then BA-BZ, etc, until column WW.

Why someone would use columns for repetitive data of this quantity is an utter mystery—that’s what rows are for.

It’s somewhat easy to calculate these numbers. Like regular numbers, you start from the rightmost letter digit and multiply its position in the alphabet (1-indexed) by 26 to the power of its digit position in the number (0-indexed), and then add every digit result together. So for example, with WW, W is the 23rd letter, so WW = (23 * 26^0) + (23 * 26^1) = 621, the 621st column from the left in Excel. That means the author of the article was shown a document with 621 columns of different data, which is incredibly silly, IMO. Again, this should be 621 rows of data!

Now, let’s examine “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”. If the author understood the math here, they would have realized that this is an incredibly large number in Excel’s pseudo-base-26 number system. It comes out to column number 459880359120217134284773785. Since it’s all the same digit (O is the 15th letter), you can calculate it as SUM(15 * 26^n, 0, 18), in other words add up 15 * 26^n for all values of n from 0 to 18 (because “OOO…” has 19 digits).

It seems clear to me the author wrote that absurd number because it had a visual effect on the reader of suggesting “many more” and followed the repetitive pattern of “WW”. I don’t think they understood the math quite well. The article discusses the 10 times “order of magnitude” more safe statistics of Tesla cars, so if there were 10x more incident reports than WW (621), that would be 6,210, which is column IDV in Excel pseudo-base-26. (22 * 26^0) + (4 * 26^1) + (9 * 26^2) = 6,210.

But “IDV” doesn’t look as impressive as “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”, and it probably would have confused even more readers!

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Edit: I see now that this could perhaps be a list of legal exhibits which use the same numbering/labeling system. So that would make more sense than egregious abuse of columns in Excel.