NOT A Muddled Mathematician

27 Per Week

Chris S. Coray,  NOT a Muddled Mathematician

Chris S. Coray, A well dressed
 Mathematician

Just for the record, I formally state that while I am male, I am not muddled.  That’s one of the differences between a mathematician and an engineer.  Math guys are not muddled.  We are often socially inept (98.7%), prone to staring off into space, make strange jokes, dress poorly, and live in mental monasteries where few choose to enter.  Most people would vaccinate themselves against us if there were such a vaccine.  There isn’t.  Further, have you ever thought to ask just who the NSA is hiring to do all the real work at the giant new NSA snooping site in Utah and the existing sites around the world?  The answer is mathematicians.  The “Revenge of the Nerds” movie is coming to your world but not as fiction.  For better or worse, we are taking over the world.  You won’t feel a thing.  Do not adjust your dial.  It’s too late.

For myself, I personally blame my current condition on ducks.  My father, who was a lawyer, loved to hunt ducks.  It was impossible for me and my brother (1 year younger than I) to avoid being initially caught up in the enthusiasm.  When I was 12 we would get up in the dark every Saturday morning beginning in October, drive in our 1953 Oldsmobile from Salt Lake to a small pond on some guy’s farm west of Brigham City, wade out to our homemade blinds, and blast away at the migrating birds.  In those days the limit was 6 ducks a day but if you had 3 ducks that were pintails or widgeon you could shoot 9.  There were lots of these bonus ducks on the little pond.  The hunting was great and so on Saturday night we would return with a gunnysack containing 27 dead and feathered ducks.  On Sunday we would spend hours picking, cleaning, and on occasion using paraffin for pinfeathers until we had all 27 ducks ready for the kitchen.  In those days nobody had a freezer, in fact, early in my life some guy brought a block of ice to our house each day to put in the refrigerator, which was therefore always stuffed with, well, you know, ducks.

I thought that bringing all this provender home would delight my mother.  Wrong.  While her family of Nimrods were all so puffed up with testosterone and pride, she had to figure out what to do with the 27 ducks before the next weekend.  We were 5 in number so one option would be to eat duck every night from Monday until Friday.  Every week.  For months.  You can only cook a duck so many ways, none worth fossil fuel.  It wasn’t too long before I learned to hate ducks as food.  You hate beets? Turnips? Liver? Mush? (I note parenthetically that on mother’s oatmeal box there was a skull and crossbones that she covered up).  Try duck ala daily, flavored with lead shot, for the entire season known as fall.  But we just kept shooting them on Saturdays.  Soon we began to give them away but after a little while it was literally the case that people who were our friends and potential duck sinks set up watch posts for our car and would close curtains, turn off lights, and hide in storm cellars when we hit their street.  We were bringing the plague of ducks to them.  If only these had been pheasants.  In my mother’s exchange rate 1 pheasant has the same value as 2,342,132 ducks.  And a goose, why it’s nothing more than a morbidly obese duck.  And the trunk of our car smelled like a dead, wet duck.  The aroma of cooking ducks bonded with the wall paint in our house and was not removable.

The upshot of all this is that I became a mathematician because I spent so much time counting ducks and people we knew, figuring out all the permutations of how many birds we could shed with each soon-to-former friend.  I began to appreciate and understand the concept of infinity.  May there be no duck eating in heaven.