Table of Contents
Introduction xi
Chapter 1 Puzzles as a Prelude 1
The Monty Hall Puzzle: Variants of It and Its Connection to a COVID-19 Precaution 3
Wanna Be President? Pass This Test 7
Now Featuring e: Pi Has Long Been in the Spotlight. What about e? 11
Put on Your Hats and Codes: A Hat Puzzle and Error-Correcting Codes 14
Scaling Up Is So Very Hard to Do 17
Scaling in Biology, Metabolic Rates, and a Puzzle about Evolutionary Time 19
Five or Six Reasons Why Parity Puzzles Are Fun 22
Course Loads: Average Paradoxes That Went to College 25
Parrando's Paradox: Losing plus Losing Equals Winning 29
Chapter 2 A Bit of Probability 33
Probability and Independent Events: A Mini-Tutorial 35
Collecting a Complete Set: Baseball Cards, Disease, and Denial of Service 39
Probability and Hitting Streaks: Does DiMaggio's Deserve an Asterisk? 41
How Many Ways: From Social Distancing to an Alternative Solution to the Birthday Problem 44
Conditional Probability (Because We Usually Know Things) and the Prosecutor's Fallacy 47
Four Times the Odds of Conviction Not Four Times as Likely and Other Distinctions 48
Randonauts and Coincidences, Fun and Nonsense 51
Calculating the Probability of Picking the Wrong Suspect 54
COVID-19: False Positives, Fatality Rates, and Base Rates 57
Future World: Privacy, Terrorists, and Pre-Perpetrators 62
Summer and Boys: A New, Very Counterintuitive Birthday Paradox 64
Chapter 3 Lies and Logic 67
Lying Brain Teasers: Politicians, Liars, and Mathematical Puzzles 69
Logical Liars, Paradoxical Politicians, and Smullyan's Stumper 72
Groucho Meets Russell 74
True If and Only If False in the Market and in Life 77
Oh No. Denials and Conditional Statements Often Counterproductive 79
The Ellsberg and St. Petersburg Paradoxes: Risks, Utility, and Our Desire for Certainty 81
Justifiably Believing That Something Is True Doesn't Mean You Know It 85
Prove This, Win $1,000,000! The Goldbach and Collate Conjectures and a Doable Puzzle 87
A Clever Card Trick and a Religious Hoax 90
Does the Declaration of Independence Guarantee Happiness? 93
Weird Science from the Hume and Bacon Institute 94
Chapter 4 Calculations and Miscalculations 97
From Dates and Y2K to People and PY2K: A Tale of Two Numbers 99
Apophenia and Spherical Cows: Clots and Coincidences 102
COVID, Calculus, and the Curve 104
Hoarding Medicines to Wearing Masks: Sociology, Public Health, and the Prisoner's Dilemma 106
Of Ants, Butterflies, and Economic Whimsy 109
There's Nothing Wrong with Fuzzy Math 112
Predicting Success? SAT Scores and College Grades and the Other SAT, the Soccer Assessment Test 115
Be Careful What You Measure and Try to Achieve-You Might Succeed 118
Sexonomics: Prostitutes' Incomes, a Nonmoralistic Account 121
Sex, Lies, and Statistics: Some Musings 123
Reductio: Abortion through the Looking Glass 126
Misunderstandings: Jesus' Genealogical Descendants, Sexual Predators, and Home Run Records 129
Chapter 5 Partisanship in Politics 133
Trump: Outrage Fatigue, Denial-of-Service Attacks, and Brandolini's Law of Refutation 134
Wolf's Dilemma and Extreme Lockstep Political Partisanship 136
Through a Mathnifying Glass Darkly 138
Ranked Choice Voting: More Welcoming to Moderate and Less Conducive to Extreme Candidates 140
Ties and Coin Flips: From Butterfly Ballots to Butterfly Effects 143
Voting Blocs: Red States, Blue States, and a Model for Thoughtless Voting 145
The Internet, Conspiracy Theories, and Cognitive Foibles, Including the Conjunction Fallacy 147
After 9-11: Mindlessly Searching for Numerological Meaning in the Midst of Tragedy 150
Chapter 6 Religious Dogmatism 153
Naturally Evolving Order and Probability versus the Claims of Intelligent Design 154
On the Quasi Apotheosis of Mathematical Ideas, Two Accounts-One Silly, the Other Serious 158
Holy Cow or Bull? ELSes: It Would Be Astonishing If One Didn't Find Hidden Messages in the Bible 161
Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet-Yeah, Right 165
Medieval Blasphemy Law just Passed in Modern Ireland 167
Ramsey Theory and the Profound Idea of Order for Free 170
Chaitin on Complexity, Randomness, and Inevitable Incompleteness 174
My Dreamy Instant Message Exchange with God(dess) 177
Chapter 7 Mathematically Flavored Books 181
Metaphors-R-Us and the Origin of Mathematical Concepts 182
Mathematics and Narrative: A Multifaceted Relationship 184
Fractal Find: Monk Discovered Mathematical Formula 700 Years Earlier Than Previously Thought 187
The Mathematical Brain: We All Have an Innate Sense of Numbers and Magnitudes 189
Infinity and Eternity: A Novelist's Math, a Physicist's Drama 192
Stephen Gould's Use of Math Clarifies His Insights on Baseball, Bacteria, and IQ 194
Nudging: How to Get People to Do the Right Thing-Maybe 197
Wolframs New Kind of Science: Simple Rules Can Generate All the Complexity We See 200
Penrose's Road to Reality: A Behemoth on Modern Math and Physics-Reader Caution Advised 202
Is the Sky Falling? And if So, When? A Probabilistic Doomsday Argument 206
Postscript 209
