Tag Archives: absurdity of numbers

Oscar on addition

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One plus one is … thirteen hundred and forty two

Talk to Oscar and you learn that he has a very unusual and variable understanding of arithmetic. Ask him the big question “what is one plus one” and he is more than likely to retort “are we buying or selling?” But I remember on one specific occasion he responded “thirteen hundred and forty two”.

A local farmer had a field of watermelons – thirteen hundred and forty four of them. Oscar knows that I love watermelons, and to please me two weeks ago he stole one from the field. The farmer was very annoyed – thirteen hundred and forty three left. Then to add insult to injury last week Oscar stole another – leaving thirteen hundred and forty two.

The farmer was furious, but he had a bright idea. He would put up a sign saying “One of these water melons has been injected with cyanide.” In injecting one melon he had lost one melon, and he knew which one. That still left thirteen hundred and forty one, so it was a price worth paying.

When this week Oscar went to steal another, he saw the sign. He came straight home, picked up a red felt-tip pen, and went straight back to the field. After scrawling over the sign, he crossed out the word ‘one’, so it now read “Two of these water melons have been injected with cyanide.”

With the farmer injecting cyanide into one melon, plus Oscar claiming to have injected one melon, the farmer had lost not two but thirteen hundred and forty two melons.

One (melon) plus one (melon) equals 1342 (melons unfit for sale).

Oscar on counting on what might have been

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As we have seen in a previous blog, Oscar knows the notion of probability is absurd. He says that if you add in ‘what might have been’, then even the whole notion of numbers gets really screwed up.

I commute by train, and the railway station is four bus stops from my home. Returning from London one day last week, I just missed a bus. So instinctively I ran after it. It came to a halt at the next stop further down the street. Just before I reached that stop, the bus took off again. Exactly the same thing happened at the next stop, and the next. Only one stop away from home, exhausted I gave up and decided to walk.

Once home I kissed the cat, and told my wife how I had run home. I was very pleased with myself. I announced that in running home I had saved £1.20.

Oscar was listening. As cynical as ever he butted in: “Call yourself a professor! If you had chased a taxi you would have saved £5.”

Oscar on the absurdity of independent variables

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Students on the LSE course Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems (ADMIS) are very familiar with my cat Oscar. Oscar is very special; he can talk.

When some friends visited my home recently, I mentioned my cat’s talent. Totally disbelieving, they gave me odds of ten-to-one that Oscar couldn’t talk. I called him over; but he just sat there, … miaow … he didn’t say a word. My friends took my money and left.

I was furious, and glared at him; “no prawns for you tonight”. Then in a very superior voice, because Oscar is a very superior cat, he purred: “call yourself a professor! Tomorrow night we’ll get a hundred-to-one.”

Oscar is saying that independent variables so beloved of statisticians simply do not exist whenever people are involved. As far as my friends were concerned there was just one bet, but for Oscar he deliberately threw today’s bet to win at far better odds tomorrow. So here we realize that by bringing time into the equation, and the fact that one party has inside information, the notion of a numerical probability bears absolutely no relation to what is actually happening.