Mathematics Of The News

“It's time to let the secret out: Mathematics is not primarily a matter of plugging numbers into formulas and performing rote computations. It is a way of thinking and questioning that may be unfamiliar to many of us, but is available to almost all of us.” (“A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper,” by John Allen Paulos. http://www.cut-the-knot.org/books/newspaper/intro.shtml)

Talk about synchronicity! Just two months ago, Conspiracy Nation had speculated, “Oldsters such as the Conspiracy Nation editor are constantly being urged by the AARP magazine to do crossword puzzles, suduko puzzles, etc. Another great puzzle is figuring out the news.” Paulos had earlier reached the same conclusion, but this editor only this morning stumbled across his novel idea.

The daily newspaper is chaos. There is however a symmetry, or underlying order. Many just give up and wait for Sports-O-Plenty Saturday, when all chaos disappears. The conspiracy theorist, ridiculed as are mathematicians, keeps attempting to solve the puzzle. The puzzle makers, the news fakers, inventors of chaos, add a delightful twist: there is no answer, they say. You are a conspiracy nut.

One of the great puzzle types is three hunters and the ducks. There are numerous variations. One example is, “Montana duck hunters are all perfect shots. Ten of them are in a duck blind when 10 ducks fly over. All 10 pick a duck at random to shoot at, and all 10 fire at the same time. How many ducks could be expected to escape, on average, if this experiment were repeated a large number of times?” (http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52142.html) You can apply this in the form, “Pollsters are perfect, except for slight margins of error. Ten candidates fly by. Ten pollsters all do a poll. Eventually, only one candidate escapes, and is elected president. Which one is it?”

Another chaotic area is religion. Islam says there is one “God” but Christianity says there are three “Gods” who are nonetheless one “God.” One mathematician, intrigued by the puzzle, summons trigonometry to his aid. Jesus “according to Christian theology is a Person of a Trinity, which has three entities, thus a triangle. So Jesus Himself has a sine and a cosine, in heavenly trigonometry... If this is an equilateral triangle, which it usually is when the Trinity is symbolized in art, then Jesus is 60 degrees, thus making his sine the square root of three over 2 and his cosine one half (0.5). That means that Jesus' sine is irrational! We behold the sine of the divine, and it is irrational! Fortunately his cosine is not. He does, after all, have two natures in one divine Person.” (“Trigonometric theology,” http://www.pyracantha.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2004/03/)

Or a puzzle variant on three hunters and the duck could be something like, Rudy Giuliani is “Mr. 9/11”. Hillary Clinton is “Mrs. Bill Clinton.” Oprah Winfrey is “Mama Obama” (because Barack Obama's own mother is deceased). A duck flies by, taking a poll. Chris Dodd, secret grandson of Joe Stalin, hides in a duck blind. A crazed gunman with an AK-47 is in the vicinity. An ice storm blankets the area and no one can see. When the ice storm leaves, who is found to be the new president?

The conspiracy thinking is a type of mathematics by elimination. It involves inverted logic (still logic, nonetheless) like some of the duck hunter puzzles. One hunter smokes a pipe; one hunter wears a plaid jacket; one hunter had chili for lunch. Which hunter shot the duck?

Conspiracy Nation

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