Tag Archives: Oscar the talking cat

Everybody knows Oscar

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Oscar the talking cat has now become very famous. Everybody knows about Oscar. I told one of my betting friends this, and he was very dismissive. So I said “choose three famous people, and we’ll go and ask them if they know Oscar. If any one of them doesn’t know Oscar then I pay you one million pounds, otherwise you pay me one million.”

“OK” he said.

First Madonna. “Do I know Oscar, everybody knows Oscar. Why just last week I asked his advice on my next single.”

Second: the Queen of England. We knocked on the palace door, and Prince Phillip answered. “Excuse me, we’ve come to ask the Queen if she knows Oscar.”

“Does she know Oscar, of course she knows Oscar. Everybody knows Oscar. Hey Liz, there are two blokes down here asking about Oscar.”

The Queen shouted back “tell them they’ve just missed him.”

My friend was getting worried now, so for his third choice he said the Pope. We were walking across St Marks Square looking up at the balcony, where we saw Oscar and the Pope deep in conversation. Suddenly a tourist taps my friend on the shoulder, and said. “Excuse me mate, up there on the balcony, who’s the guy in white talking to Oscar?”

Oscar on Managing Uncertainty

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A little while ago Oscar was invited to be a keynote speaker at a commercial conference: ‘Managing Uncertainty’. He shared the stage with a statistician and the conference chairman. The statistician was on first. He droned on and on about Risk being all about distributions and expectations. The business audience found it inspiring stuff! Within five minutes eyes began to glaze over. After ten he was talking to an audience of one: Oscar. Oscar was on the stage, and so he had to listen to the rubbish.

But then, Oscar was expecting this. He always says that a statistician is someone who wants to work with numbers, but doesn’t have the personality to be an accountant. Statisticians think the average human being has one tit and one testicle.

Finally the man finished, and it was Oscar’s turn. He walked slowly over to the podium, and just stood there, … and stood there, … and stood there. For a whole minute he just stood there. He fidgeted, and shot frantic and terrified glances at the audience. At first there was silence, then a few murmurs, then a growing rumble of concern. The chairman rose to help, and was half way across the stage when Oscar banged his paw on the table. In a firm voice he announced: “now that’s uncertainty, it has nothing to do with statistics.”

Oscar on Expectation

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Some time ago Oscar watched a thief break into a neighbour’s house. The owners were out at a concert and had left the house in darkness. The burglar was stumbling around, not realising Oscar had followed him inside. Then in a quiet voice Oscar whispered “Be careful. Jesus is watching you.”

The burglar almost jumped out of his skin. Who said that?

“Oscar” came the ghostly reply. But nothing else happened. He must have imagined it.

As the thief was going up the stairs the silence was once again broken with: “Be careful. Jesus is watching you.” Who said that?

The disembodied voice said: “I’m Oscar.” The burglar screamed and bolted down stairs. Once again: “Be careful. Jesus is watching you” rang out.

The thief fell, and crashed to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Looking up he sees Oscar the cat creeping down the stairs.

“I told you to be careful. Jesus is watching you.”

Recovering his senses, the burglar decided he must have hit his head in the fall and was imagining things. He looked straight at Oscar and said: “what sort of idiot do you think I am. A talking cat called Oscar indeed?”

Pointing over his shoulder, Oscar calmly replied: “The same sort of idiot who failed to see the rottweiler called Jesus standing behind you.”

Here we have yet another lesson on statistics from Oscar. What’s the point of going on and on about expectations, when the world always confronts you with the unexpected.

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.