Trying to be a Geek, and Failing
My wife watches Dancing with the Stars, and has a bunch of old episodes she was plowing through this weekend on TIVO. Contestant Mark Cuban, Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, seems to want to cultivate a geek image. Each dancer is given a score of 1-10 from each of three judges. Upon getting his score of 7+7+7=21, Cuban made a comment that one would classify as fairly unusual for such a show: "I was kind of hoping for a higher prime number."
I am sure most of the viewers ooohed and aaahhhed. What an intellectual Mark Cuban is! Except there is a problem. 21 is not a prime number. Yes, it’s sort of seductively odd, like 51 or 87, but like those numbers it is divisible by 3. Which makes sense since his score was computed as 3×7. OK, so maybe he was talking about the "7" he received from each judge. Well, the number 7 is indeed prime. But there are no other prime numbers less than or equal to 10. It would be impossible to get a higher prime number score than 7 unless the judges went up to a Spinal-Tap-esque 11.
I really wasn’t going to publish this little insight until I saw TJIC publish this.
Update: Fixed link. I guess it is a bad sign of my own geek-dom if I can’t get an html link right.
Xmas:
7, 7, and 7?
He should have quipped, “They read me, write me and execute me!”
November 12, 2007, 9:34 amla petite chou chou:
7 7 7 sounds like a jackpot to me….
November 12, 2007, 11:22 amMoron Pundit:
If he started to talk about perfect numbers, I’d start to believe he was a geek.
November 12, 2007, 1:51 pmClark Cooper:
I didn’t see this, but is it possible that there is a comma between higher and prime? That is, he was hoping to get a 23 (at least), which would be a higher, prime number.
November 13, 2007, 9:13 am