Turkey Math

A facebook friend recently posted a link to an article frying Roman Polanski, albeit in a thoughtful and moderated manner. This facebook friend normally posts entries on her evening meal, her evening drink, and what trouble her daughters are up to. She eschews the usual farmland, gangland and eggland games that seem to fill up my facebook screen with pigs, molls, and yolks. For this I am most grateful. She took the time out, however, from her usual light and amusing posts about her life, to help skewer an aging European director. 

 Now, I have no sympathy for the guy. Love his movies, admire the man, but he did a pretty bad thing and (even though it WAS the seventies) most everyone I know agrees he should suffer some sort of significant penalty for that. I have nine month old daughter, and the first change I noticed in myself is that I have no empathy for ANY person who harms a child in ANY way (even though it WAS the seventies). And when I saw the link on facebook from a friend who normally posts about daily life, who keeps the number of posts down to two or three a day, and who has REPEATEDLY warned me about posting ANYTHING remotely controversial (as it may follow you for the rest of your life), I thought – Wow, she's hot about this. THIS has people’s attention. This is a Major Topic. 

 And this is one of those spots when this blog can go in any direction. Punishment. Parenthood. Hollywood. Morality. However, THIS blog is going to discuss racism and mathematics. Because a great deal of ink pixels have been spent discussing this topic. It’s a worthy topic. 

But there was another story fighting for the same amount of space at the same time. Two South Pacific earthquakes in Sumatra and Samoa and the resulting tsunamis combined to kill approximately 1500 people. A quick check of the larger digital media over the last two days shows a roughly equitable level of reporting. A quick check of reader comments on a recent MSN report on both stories shows this score: Earthquake story: 14 comments Polanski story: 132 comments These comments are a poor metric for measure because the Polanski story was posted for 18 hours and the earthquake story for seven. 

I could try to mathematically calculate number of comments per hour, but I’m not gonna. I’m an old-fashioned fella. I’m going to take the print edition of the LA Times as my metric. So here are the number of times I saw each story on the front page of the LA Times over a week in late September, early October (warning: results may vary, I don’t have that good a memory). Polanski 3, Earthquake 1 Okay, let’s call it even (even though it isn’t - I’m just trying to make a point here, not let facts get in the way). Time for the math portion of blog. What we have here is the arrest of one white European director roughly equal to the deaths of 1500 poor brown people. We can write this mathematically: 1WED = 1500PBP or 1500PBP/1WED = 1

or even

1WED > 1PBP But that’s not the whole story, is it? There is a variable in the 1wed figure that needs to be added. This 1WED is considered by most to be a child molester Again, I’m not going to get into specifics about what exact charges were leveled or what all the circumstances were. Let’s just call him a child molester because 1) he molested a child, 2) everyone knows what a child molester is, and 3) I’m going to use CM as the variable, as in: 1WED * CM = 1500PBP

So now we’re getting somewhere. By dividing both sides by cm, you get

1WED = 1500PBP/CM.

So it would take 1500 acts of child molestation amongst poor brown people to attain LA Times headlines. Good to know. Next time, we can discuss the value of wartime dead journalists vs wartime dead soldiers, which seems to be at the following rate:

1WDJ = 15KIA.

Recently, a Pulitzer-prize winning LA Times journalist died and made the front page, so we can also see that

1PDJ = 15KIA, which then leads us to

1WDJ = 1PDJ

or

W = P (War = Pulitzer, factored down) Math can be so illuminating.