Engadget gave the Galaxy Note 7 a 91/100. Three weeks later it was banned from airplanes.

Let's do the math, folks. Engadget: 91/100. FAA flight ban: 1 phone. Recalls: 2. Documented battery fires in the US alone: 96+. Samsung's writedown: $5.3 billion. Time elapsed between the glowing review and airline gate agents reading 'do not power on this device under any circumstances' off a laminated card: 22 days. The math ain't mathing.

A 91/100 is a statistical claim. You are saying: across 100 hypothetical universes, this phone is excellent in 91 of them. The actual hit rate was zero. The phone wasn't merely flawed — it was structurally combustible. Samsung issued a global recall. Then issued a recall on the recall. Then sent out fireproof return boxes. Fireproof. Return. Boxes. That is a feature so rare in consumer electronics that no scoring rubric on Earth has a column for it, yet here we are, awarding 91 points to a device whose long-term reliability metric was 'please stop charging it before it ignites your nightstand.'

The review opens with effusive praise for the battery, which is the technology equivalent of a movie critic in 1912 praising the Titanic's draftsmanship. Nine paragraphs about the screen. Six about the stylus. Zero about thermal runaway, which would become, within a month, the only feature of the Note 7 anyone could remember. Engadget's scoring criteria apparently treats 'sets pillow on fire' as a neutral attribute, weighted somewhere between 'has fingerprint reader' and 'comes in three colors.'

A review is a prediction. The Note 7 review is the prediction-equivalent of forecasting sunny weather while standing inside an active hurricane. The numbers don't lie. The reviewer did. Mathematically, this review should be expressed as a negative integer. We give it a 1 only because our scoring system doesn't accept imaginary numbers.