Monday, January 29, 2018
The formula gaff
A couple of detective shows featuring a fake System for betting have similar-sounding fake formulas in the System. Considering radio and TV writing schedules, the two episodes would have been written almost simultaneously. Wonder if the same writer was involved in both?
Earlier one: A 1952 episode of Let George Do It. George is investigating the murder of a bettor who supposedly developed a System to beat the roulette wheel. He finds a piece of paper with the calculations, and his Girl Friday reads it out loud:
"... the square root of C3D over A plus B equals the square root of C3D parenthesis A plus B over parenthesis A plus B times C...."
Later one: A 1953 episode of Racket Squad, where a conman displays his fake System and sells its "secret" to "carefully selected" suckers. As he calculates the winning order for the fourth race, he mumbles:
"A squared plus B squared divided by two pi R squared equals the square root of M."
Neither formula makes sense, but the latter writer seems to have been trying a bit harder.
Math could possibly help with the wheel, but it would necessarily involve factorials and derivatives, not square roots. Math wouldn't help at all with horses, but a System based on astrology could bend the odds. Horses, like all living things, respond to moon phases, and we know now that birth season shapes the epigenes. You could correlate the moon response to the birth season of a horse, conceivably leading to a prediction of better or worse performance at various moon phases.
¶ 3:17 PM 
