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Worst...Day...Ever
A friend emails a link to this story featuring scientific (well, mathematical, at least) proof that today is the worst day ever. Speaking of inappropriate deployments of math, I can't be the only one who caught Numbers on CBS last night after the football game was over. When I was a young aspiring nerd I used to watch 3-2-1 Contact on PBS which featured a segment (airing on Fridays, I believe, as a special treat) called Mathnet which was both about math detectives and a parody of Dragnet which, naturally enough, I had never seen. Loved the math detectives, so I was hoping for some similar action on Numbers, but it was pretty disappointing.
My complaints about the show are legion, starting with the point that the powers that be at CBS are apparently insisting that the actual name of the show must be the inane Numb3rs which, in addition to being meaningless, is unpronounceable and only even makes sense as a vision pun if you write the title out in all caps as NUMB3RS which requires you to awkwardly removing your finger from the shift key in order to avoid the catastrophic NUMB#RS. As a writer -- I object. And then -- the math! The supposed genius' method appears to have consisted of plotting crime scenes, drawing an irregular curve the connect them, and then hypothesizing that the origin of the scatter should be . . . near the middle of the curve. This hardly requires the sort of complicated stuff the math dude was scribbling on the blackboard. Even if you want to credit him with something a bit more sophisticated, this was, at best, fairly basic statistics of the sort that they teach to bright high school students. The kind of math that, as Larry Summers would tell you, even a girl can do!
UPDATE: My colleague Ayelish, though genetically incapable of doing math is apparently well-suited to remembering stuff, and points out that "Mathnet" was part of Square One not 3-2-1 Contact.
January 24, 2005 | Permalink
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» Arriving at certainty from Strata Lucida
CBS has a new entrant in the inevitably formulaic crimelab-drama genre: "Numbers" or, as their typographers would have it, "NUMB3RS". I suppose the producers must have been Tom Lehrer fans ("he spelled his name Hen3ry -- the '3' was silent,... [Read More]
Tracked on Jan 25, 2005 5:30:06 PM
Comments
broken html alert!
Posted by: right | Jan 24, 2005 11:59:48 AM
Everybody lean the other way, quick!
Posted by: Wrye | Jan 24, 2005 12:00:25 PM
Yes, as another fan of Math Net, I was looking forward to it, but it was so disappointed that I had to turn it off. Plus it seemed like make work for out of work sitcom actors.
Posted by: MC | Jan 24, 2005 12:10:24 PM
Mathnet was the best part of 321 Contact. I hated those first 25 minutes, but it was all worth it to get those last five of Mathnet. Oh, to have an entire half hour episode stretched out of a week seems so bourgois now, but then it was wonderful. If only they could air them as full episodes now.
P.S. Is it a coincidence that all the stars of the show are Jewish?
Posted by: dstein | Jan 24, 2005 12:13:30 PM
I believe MathNet was a recurring segment on Square One, a PBS show only about math. 3-2-1 Contact was about science in general.
Posted by: James Muspratt | Jan 24, 2005 12:16:08 PM
Yep, Mathnet was on Square One, not 3-2-1 Contact. 3-2-1 Contact used to have "The Bloodhound Gang," a bunch of kids who used science to solve mysteries. Also, I think Mathnet was on every day, not just Fridays - it was a little bit at the end of the show each day for the whole week, and George Friday and Kate Monday (later Pat Tuesday) would solve the mystery on Friday.
Posted by: Andrew | Jan 24, 2005 12:31:53 PM
Personally, I felt that "Mathman" (parody of Pac-Man) was what really made Square One, not "Mathnet" -- although one does remember with fondness the line "the names are made up, but the numbers are real." Were the producers of Square One trying to brainwash our children to be Platonists? I report, you decide.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Jan 24, 2005 12:35:38 PM
What about David Numberman?
Posted by: Evan McElravy | Jan 24, 2005 12:43:06 PM
The fact that people's heuristic for "what does a random set of points look like" is wrong -- people underestimate the likelihood of clusters -- is a subtle, important, and easily graspable mathematical insight. If they deliver one such moment every episode, the show will be well worth it from the mathematical point of view.
Posted by: J. Ellenberg | Jan 24, 2005 12:46:32 PM
What about caps lock?
Posted by: Ruth | Jan 24, 2005 12:52:50 PM
Mathnet was definately on Square One, not 3-2-1 Contact (which was still an awesome show, because it had the Bloodhound Gang detective segments).
IMHO, the best part of Mathnet was the part at the beginning when they whipped out their calculators and punched in several numbers to confirm they were working properly.
Ironically, though the afternoons of my youth were scheduled around Square One, I still blow at math.
Posted by: Jeremy | Jan 24, 2005 1:01:22 PM
I'll take this opportunity to bitch that Mathnet episodes were indeed always solved on Fridays, and since I was chronically unavailable Friday afternoons during my youth (having lived a overscheduled activity-laden childhood), I never got to see many episodes actually solved unless it was a snow day or something similar intervened.
Similarly, I never got to see many Legend of Zelda episodes on the Mario Brothers show. But I doubt my education suffered much for that.
Posted by: phil | Jan 24, 2005 1:10:34 PM
Actually, I think the line was: "The names are made up, but the problems are real."
I believe I once saw the male Mathnet detective on Law & Order. That was weird.
Posted by: JP | Jan 24, 2005 1:10:52 PM
Ack! Square One was the lamest show PBS ever produced for my generation (late X, early Y). My mom made me watch it because I hated math and avoided it at all costs. It only proved to me that math was something that couldn't be made interesting even with the benefit of cutesy jokes and parodies. Thank God it was short-lived. On the other hand, 3-2-1 Contact was rad.
Posted by: Christina | Jan 24, 2005 1:17:51 PM
I think the math difficulty lay in incorporating all available knowledge about the crimes and the geography of the city into the model.
My objection is that it was a plot ripped off from Silence of the Lambs.
Posted by: Patrick | Jan 24, 2005 1:18:16 PM
3-2-1 Contact and SquareOne are just at the edge of the television I can remember consuming as a young kid (along with some World League of American Football).
Does anyone know the episode of Contact that had a character with....toilet paper rolls for eyes......stranded out in the desert? What the hell was that about?
The songs on Square One were pretty good too, for kids programming. Angle Dance doesn't, to an ear that didn't experience New Wave as it happened, sound particularly cheap or cheesy. Same with "It All Comes Back to Nine" (it's true!) which has a really catchy, twangy guitar in it.
Also, the LA episodes of Mathnet were better than the NY ones.
Posted by: SamAm | Jan 24, 2005 1:20:26 PM
"The supposed genius' method appears to have consisted of plotting crime scenes, drawing an irregular curve the connect them, and then hypothesizing that the origin of the scatter should be . . . near the middle of the curve. This hardly requires the sort of complicated stuff the math dude was scribbling on the blackboard." It's been a while since I took math -- though I did take Math 25 back at our alma mater, Matthew -- but I think you've misidentified the tricky part. Knowing to look in the middle of the curve is probably not hard, I agree. But for some collection of points, knowing what curve to draw in the first place may well be very difficult indeed.
Posted by: Jonathan Weinberg | Jan 24, 2005 1:40:13 PM
Hey! I remember angle dance!
There was a line like "stick your boyfriend to the ceiling, if he loves you he won't mind." (The friend was stuck there so the girl could position her arms at angels to his more easily).
Posted by: Glaivester | Jan 24, 2005 1:50:32 PM
the silliest bit was when he had the bright idea that there were two centers of gravity, and he re-ran the model, the first center didn't move at all..
now, with a good model maybe it wouldn't have moved much, but...
Posted by: Atrios | Jan 24, 2005 1:51:04 PM
Another question: Once the FBI had an approximate location for where the suspect lived, wouldn't it make more sense to look at a database of all people living there first and checking for previous offenders (which is what they did later in the show), rather than staking out everyone and collecting DNA samples? Then, the show might have been over in half an hour rather than one hour.
Clueless
Posted by: clueless | Jan 24, 2005 2:07:37 PM
Hmm, guess it was square one. Let's see how many "episodes" of Mathnet I remember (even after getting the show wrong): I clearly remember one involving a clown and some bank robberies that was based on what days of the week he was available. There was also one with a sax player who couldn't remember the second part of "somewhere over the rainbow" - I think that episode took place in a mansion somewhere. Oy, that's just two.
I wonder if any serial rapists were watching NUMB3RS and realize that to truly appear random, they need to commit two crimes within a block of each other, as well as other scattered locations. Hmmmm
Posted by: dstein | Jan 24, 2005 2:17:12 PM
Just this morning, apropos of nothing, I was humming the Square One song "Tesselation," the Beach Boys-inspired geometry ditty.
If Numb&rs ever does an episode where a parrot squawks the Fibonacci series, you know you've got a Mathnet ripoff. And it's inevitable, because how many math-related crime stories are left to tell?
Posted by: Grumpy | Jan 24, 2005 2:24:20 PM
Nothing wrong with "NUMB#RS." It approximates how a lot of people feel about them. Though "N!@#*~$" would be a better approximation....
Posted by: hm | Jan 24, 2005 2:39:33 PM
Not that it will in any way help figure out the plot in the pilot episode, but you should know that it is indeed possible to type out NUMB3RS without having to fool around with the shift-key. Just put on the CAPS LOCK feature. Unless you intentionally hit the shift key while the CAPS are on, everything will be in caps, but the number keys will appear as struck (no '#') pop up.
Posted by: Rob A. | Jan 24, 2005 2:47:46 PM
Damn blogs. Now I have the theme songs to 3-2-1 Conact *and* The Bloodhound Gang firmly lodged in my head; they'll be there for days.
Posted by: Jacob T. Levy | Jan 24, 2005 2:58:27 PM
