Analyzing My Vote

With my only votes comprising of an absentee vote from Mexico, and an off the cuff vote in person, I decided to take this Presidential Election a bit more seriously. So seriously, in fact, that one of my personal goals for this year was to understand 27 key political issues. So, on the eve of the eve of the election, my wife and I used a method to determine our candidates that I would highly recommend if you have the time or interest. Warning: You very well may end up splitting your self up across party lines instead of down them.

Method:
1. Find some list of core issues which have the presidential candidates charted out on each one. Here's what we used.
2. Without looking at what each candidate said, answer each question yourself as Pro or Con.
3. After finishing, compare your answers to each candidate.
4. Take this as a percentage of the answers for which the candidate actually took a stand (ignore Not Enough Info and Not Clear. Also, correct "Now Con" to be "Con").
5. Review your top 2 candidates and ensure that the candidate with the highest score does not support any non-negotiable issues for you.

There was no surprise that my Yankee wife was heavily Democratic. What was interesting is that her second choice was the Green party! As for me, the surprise was an even split between the Republican and Democratic party, and a clear favorite for the Conservative Party's candidate.

We'll see if we follow these intuitions at the poll. Maybe my best choice will be wearing yellow boots to the church to cast my ballot.

Gnostic Miracles

But if I do it, even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.  John 10:38

In high school, my AP English Literature teacher and I had lengthy conversations over whether it was acceptable to believe Jesus just because of the miraculous signs and wonders he did. Because of this verse, I said of course it was acceptable. Jesus did mighty and powerful things to demonstrate his power to the Jews. Jesus was certainly a demonstration of the power of God. He did have a point, though, because as Paul reminds the Corinthians in his letter, Jesus' death was a stumbling block for those looking for God's power because he was weak. He was also a stumbling block for the Gentiles, because as they looked for wisdom they found what appeared to be foolishness in Christ.

Nevertheless, his miracles remain as a testimony to his power and divinity, as professed by the blind man from birth before the Pharisees (John 9:13:34).

But what would the Gnostics have thought? They of course, would have assumed Jesus' divinity and separated his nature from his humanity. After all, the spiritual self is the true, pure, and better self, according to this worldview. So what miracles were given them so that they might know and understand?

Here is a short list of the Gnostic miracles - the signs and wonders meant to convince us of Jesus' humanity:

1. Jesus was born of a woman.
2. Jesus turns water into urine.
3. Jesus eats a loaf of bread and 2 fish.
4. Jesus swims in the water.
5. Jesus sees a blind man.
6. Jesus endures a storm.

While this list is certainly facetious, there are many comments in the Gospel that do lead us to see Jesus as a man and not just a spiritual representation. This is a wonderful mystery. The details include:

1. Jesus really was born, and was laid in a manager. He likely did cry.
2. Jesus walked with his parents to Jerusalem. He grew in stature.
3. Jesus got hungry after fasting.
4. Jesus was asleep during the storm.
5. Jesus was often at peoples houses eating and drinking.
6. Jesus was thirsty and asked for water to drink from the woman at the well.

Let us look at the miracles and ordinary acts of this man and trust that he truly was God's Son - Emmanuel.

Prime Time

 

What a name for what a man. He played football and baseball, not just in high school but in the majors. He also played both sides of the ball for the Cowboys, and I can remember one occasion when the color commentary during a lull in the football game drifted to explaining the differences between the two helmets that Deion sported.

But I'm not talking about this amazing star of the Atlanta Braves outfield. I'm also not talking about the not referring to  χαιρος - the concept of the time being the right time.

No, I'm talking about prime in the mathematical sense. Recently, I was bothering my wife with undesirable behavior, and when chastised, I quickly noted that I only do it when the time is prime, pointing to the clock which displayed a time whose digits summed to a prime number. When I repeated the mistake I simply pointed to the clock in helpless submission to prime time.

After this going on for a few days and happening much more frequently than socially acceptable, we began to question how common these prime numbers really were. 

In the first example, the sum is clearly 19, which is prime. In the second example, however, just 20 minutes later, the sum is 16 which is decidedly composite.

So how common are the times of the first kind? How much of our time is actually prime?

Acknowledging that neither 0 or 1 are considered prime, we then have a simple computational task of determining which of the 1,440 minute sums are prime.  If we use military time, then the possible range of sums spans 0 to 24, which occur at midnight and 19:59 respectively. So, our questions is really how does base 60 for the minutes, and the limitation of the hours to 0 through 23 affect the distribution of sums on the range of 0 to 24. Below is a histogram with an approximated normal distribution on top of it.

I probably shouldn't have been, but I was stunned to see the distribution so closely follow a normal curve. But to our real question, how many of these are prime? It turns out that 505 minutes of our day sum to prime numbers in military time. This corresponds to 35% of the time being prime. Likely not a coincidence is that between of the 25 numbers in our range 9 of them are prime leading to a 35% prime rate in our range. Again, being a Math major, I shouldn't be surprised by this fact, but it surprises me that the rate of primes in the time in our day corresponds to the rate of primes in the range of the possible sums. Further more that the possible sums corresponds to the hours in the day begins to border on numerology instead of mathematical observation.

Going further with this question, I began to ask questions like what percentage of the time are all of the numbers displayed primes individually (2% - e.g. 22:22, 23:25, 23:57, etc.), what percentage of the time are any of the numbers display primes (85% - e.g. 0:02, 11:16, 22:24, etc.), and what percentage of the time are there any 1, 2, 3, or 4 digit primes displayed on the clock face (92%).

For those of you considering the differences presented by limiting our attention to the laymen's watches, you might be surprised that the percentage of primes is only slightly higher at 36%. The notable fact when we begin to consider the other questions is that there are no examples where all the numbers are prime since the tens digit of the hour is always either 0 or 1.

All of this to say, I wonder if Deion ever felt like his swings were actually on prime time...television.