Jul
29
More fun with numbers
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I’m rereading “Fermat’s Enigma,” about the solving of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and not for the first time I’m struck by how much fun numbers are, and how none of my math teachers was able to convey this information to me when I could have used it.
Different numbers have different personalities. Odd numbers behave differently from even numbers. Some numbers are irregular and others are even irrational. And some are SO negative!
I did not know, until I read this book, about “friendly numbers.” There are several pairs of numbers in which the factors of one (the numbers by which they can be divided with no remainder) add up to the other number, and vice versa.
I learned something cool about “pi,” the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It starts as 3.14159 but continues into infinity with, unlike many other infinitely fractional numbers, no perceptible pattern of repetition. But that’s really only true when expressed as numbers past a decimal point. You can also express it as 4 x {1/1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 + 1/13 - 1/15 + 1/17…} and so forth into infinity. So there is a pattern after all, and an elegant one. Cool, huh?
And Fermat’s Last Theorem? That has been considered for centuries the toughest mathematics problem of all time. The easiest way to explain it is to start with something we all learned in school, the Pythagorian Theorem: for any right-angle triangle, the square of the two sides that meet at a right angle — “a” squared plus “b” squared — equals the square of the third side, “c” squared.
Fermat was an amateur mathematician in France who wrote in the margin of a book that he had figured out that a-squared plus b-squared may equal c-squared, but if you cube the values instead of squaring them, it doesn’t work, and indeed it doesn’t work for any factor higher than that. “I have found the most wonderful proof of this,” he wrote, but in Latin, “which this margin unfortunately is too small to contain.”
Fermat wrote that in 1637. It was discovered after his death. And for three and a half centuries the greatest minds tried and failed to work up a proof for Fermat’s conjecture.
Words are my business, so I can’t resist pointing out a theorem is only a conjecture until it’s proven, and until someone else could prove that Fermat was right, it was only conjecture that he had truly found a theorem. But I don’t mind the “last” in “Fermat’s Last Theorem,” because though it was not the last thing he came up with, it was indubitably the last one to be figured out by those who followed him.
The problem is all the more amazing when you hear that Fermat did actually write down a proof that the Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t work if you switch from the power of 2 to the power of 4, and Leonhard Euler proved it didn’t work for the power of 3. What won’t work for the powers of 3 or 4 won’t work for multiples of 3 or 4, either, so, really, much progress was made a long time ago.
Mathematician Andrew Wiles announced his proof in 1993, then found a gap in his logic, and published the proof only in 1995 after he and a colleague figured out how to patch the problem. The actual proof is so complicated that there is a new conjecture that Fermat didn’t actually find a proof, only thought he had.
Jul
29
In the next five days, Starbucks announced Tuesday, it will close 61 locations in Australia, three quarters of all the Starbuckses down under.
CEO Howard Schultz explained the retreat by attributing it to “challenges unique to the Australian market,” which was intriguing, so I read several online articles about it.
What’s unique about the Australian market turns out to be that Australians are fussy about their coffee, there is a thriving market of small rivals to Starbucks, and word-of-mouth abounds about which local competition is cheaper, better or both.
That could happen here.
A friend of mine predicted 20 years ago that the Next Big Thing in this market space will be the reinvention of English high tea at tea bars. I still hope this happens.
Jul
29
How to engage with the media
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9 | 1 Comment
“You people in the media are all alike,” a lady told me once in a voicemail. “You’ve got your story written before you ever cover it.”
Now, I’ve worked with a guy who never showered and talked to himself, and another who told fascinating tales of belonging to a nudist camp, and another who was proud of being able to kill someone with his bare hands, so I am always amused to be told that we people in the media are all alike.
I’m sure lawyers, doctors, police officers, politicians and other members of high-profile professions are equally amused, and perhaps also sometimes irritated or saddened, to be reminded that others have formed ridiculous views of their uniform incompetence, venality, bias or whatever.
The strange thing is that sometimes I get emails from people who actually mean to engage me, persuade me, open my mind, inform me, change my views, interest me in covering a story, yet they still can’t resist mentioning at some point that they know I can’t or won’t change what I report because I’m part of a cabal or a uniform mindset that is at variance with theirs.
And this is the stuff that gets sent to your amicable Uncle Howard. Goodness knows what gets sent to journalists and commentators who take a more serious or confrontatory tone.
If you actually want to encourage a news person to consider a point of view that accords with your own, you might begin by (1) not insulting them with the accusation that they’re in someone’s pocket, and (2) not taking the position that all news people are alike, which may tend to undermine a more reasonable position that you’re about to take on some other subject.
To encourage a more amiable discourse, let me give you some inside information about how journalists really are, and how the news really gets covered, from someone who has worked for two wire services, three radio networks, and several local radio and television stations and newspapers.
- THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “THE MEDIA.” There are many kinds of media and almost no sweeping statements apply to all of them. Most newspaper people haven’t got a clue how television works and vice versa, and neither of them understand radio. I know — I’ve worked in all three fields.
- THE “LIBERAL MEDIA” IS ALSO A FICTION. People who work in news tend to reflect the social and political sentiment of the public at large. Media people tended to be more liberal in the Kennedy-Johnson years than during the Reagan years. Younger reporters tend to be more liberal, just as younger people generally are, and then they become more conservative they grow older. Most newsrooms have both. And there are exceptions both ways.
- JOURNALISTS THINK THEY ROOT FOR THE UNDERDOG. There is a popular sentiment in the news business that it is the job of news people to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” It is true that the underdog is often a good story in the same way that “Mister Smith Goes to Washington” is a good movie. And it is also true that activists seeking change tend to put out of a lot of press releases, making it easy to cover them.
- OFFICIAL VIEWS SOMETIMES HAVE AN EDGE. Some official news sources get plenty of coverage because they are regarded as usually reliable. There isn’t exactly a “bias” in favor of the police and fire departments, but we tend to consider their information reliable, which is why it’s such a scandal when things turn out otherwise.
- INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING IS RARE. Most newspapers, radio and TV stations have limited resources. Most outlets have no investigative reporter whatever, and if there is one she or he often gets diverted to other stories. One reason some people come to believe that “the media” are unsympathetic to them is that they believe X to be true and expect a reporter to write it on their say-so. If you want to tip a newspaper to a story that requires some looking into, you might have as well approach an editor directly, because that’s who a reporter would have to approach.
- NEWS PEOPLE WANT TO UNDERSTAND. Instead of telling someone he’s biased, write, “I’d like to try to explain this from my point of view. To me….” You might actually persuade them.
A note about bias. Liberals think Fox News is deliberately biased. Conservatives for years made the same charge against National Public Radio. As a political independent, I listen for it on both sides, and, yes, sometimes I hear it, but usually it sounds to me like it’s accidental. And as an insider I know how easy it is for it to happen by accident. It is equally easy for you to jump to the conclusion that a news organization is biased. It happens, quite often, because of two interesting phenomena.
- INVISIBLE VIEWS. Suppose you believe fervantly that Democrats are good and Republicans are bad. If so, when a pro-Republican comment is aired on the news, you hear it as a point of view, because you disagree with it. But when you hear a pro-Democrat comment, and you agree with it and consider it to be the truth, it does not sound like a point of view at all, and may not even register since it does not annoy you. One result of this is that, remembering all the comments you didn’t agree with, you form the impression that you’re being subjected to a pro-Republican slant. I’ve been fascinated by this ever since covering the Ford-Carter president race in Washington, D.C., and getting an equal number of complaints from Republicans and Democrats, all convinced we were biased against them.
- REINFORCEMENT OF VIEWS. Whatever your strongly-held view of things, you can find a newsletter or a website or a cable channel that will constantly reinforce your own view, until you come to think of it as not being a view at all, but merely as truth. I’ve been fascinated by this in recent years, because friends and family forward me a lot of political email, both Republican and Democrat, both containing unsubstantiated slams against the other side, and then later I hear someone expressing the same view as if it’s known fact and I know where they got it from. Both sides do it. Opinionated media that reinforce your own pre-existing views can insulate you from facts or opinions that do not accord with your worldview.
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