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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (449970)	8/29/2003 2:15:10 AM
From: Doug R	Respond to of 769667

Who won by 18181 votes in 2002 election. DANNY SCHEEL (Texas): 18,181 votes (Comol County) CARTER CASTEEL (Texas): 18,181 votes (Comol Country) JEFF WENTWORTH (Texas): 18,181 votes (Comol County) CANDICE MILLER (Michigan): 18,181 Votes(Lapeer County) MICHAEL SMIGIEL (Maryland): 18,181 Votes (St. Anne's) In addition, all five won and all five were Republicans. Even odder 3 of the 5 came from not just the same state but the same county! when you're starting from a round number (a multiple of ten, say, like 10 or 100 or 1000), and you chop off a tenth or you add on a tenth, you end up with math problems involving numbers one away from 10 - ninths or elevenths. When you start off with a nice round number and you chop off or tack on a fraction, you no longer have that nice round number to work with anymore - the original nice round number is bigger or smaller by that fraction, and all your previous fractions are out of whack now. A typical situation is where you bump up a number by 10%, like when you go from 100 to 110. Now if you've used up 10 units of that, you're looking at 1/11, not 1/10. OK, so what's the point? The point is that ninths and elevenths come up a lot when you're starting with a multiple of ten and bumping it up or down by 10% - something we do in a lot of situations. When you write out 1/11 as a decimal, you get 0.09090909... which looks really cool. The fraction 2/11 looks like 0.1818181818... which also looks pretty cool. Which brings us to the mysterious electoral number 18,181 which crops up in so many suspicious elections in Texas. Some people have ventured an explanation by noticing that a=1 and h=8 in the alphabet, giving "ahaha". scoop.co.nz There's might be a more mathematical way of looking at this. 18,181 is 200,000/11 (if you truncate it, instead of rounding it. Rounding would give 18,181.81 = 18,182 - but let's just assume Republican hackers are too stupid to know that rule about rounding up when it's over a half, and they just truncate all the time.) 18,181 is not a weird number because it's a palindrome or because it maps to ahaha - it's an important number because it results when you're dividing a nice round number by 11 - a situation that often happens when you're incrementing or decrementing some starting number by 10%.