Quote:
wow Earle => you're one half "Superstition", plus you're apparently one half "Mathematician" ...
Superstitious - no. Mathemetician - yes - used to be a math teacher.
Trying to be brief:
I did a project with a few math classes years ago. It started as a joke. Being a sci fi fan, I relayed to them that people who know the significance of the number 42 will find there is a legit geek subculture that most people never are aware of as artists, scientists, film makers, etc. deliberately tie the number into their works.
A student asked why, specifically, 42 and not some other number was picked by the guy who started it all. So we all picked out own random number to look for/record encounters with for one month. Students went into it with differing attitudes. Many wanted to show other random numbers show up just as often.
The end of the month results were every student - whether they liked it or not - said/admitted the number of times they encountered the number 42 (by 1/3 to 1/2 times) than their own random number!
Although I cannot prove it, over the years I have come to believe, like there are similar thinking patterns in people the number 42 seems also to be a convenient random number that appears more frequently - possibly due to a pattern of how we humans think. The "Amazing Kreskin" used his knowledge of human pattern thinking to make it seem like he was reading the minds of his audience. He asked his audience members to draw 3 shapes, one inside the other. For some reason, it was found a good majority of people always draw a triangle in a circle in a square. Tryong to keep this as short as possible - more detailed trick but the concept of the pattern was established as real and he capitalized on it..
I think - but am not sure - chaos theory might support the need for some random numbers to be prevalent.
I stated a long time ago in this contest that I was not being too serious. I have actually put few serious guesses in. I have centered most of them around the number 42. I have done little homework with any of these coins and have actually not been consulting grading sites to see the conditions of the coins - keeping it very random as I am not skilled at grading.
The numbers I entered have not come out too far off - not necessarily winning, but not far off either. Even look back at the last 2.
Again, my only explanation has to fall back on the number being just a convenient random number. This would also help explain how the number was picked by the original guy who started it all.
I can prove none of this and most likely never will be able to. To me the fun is playing with the experimentation to see what happens.
... yes, I am having fun
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Posted 06/05/2012 01:44 am
Douglas Adams is an incredibly funny author!! 
