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Dead Bee Mathematics Posting Date: Sep 16 2007 10:56PM There’s a dead bee in the middle of my floor. He’s lying there, belly-up, like a murder victim waiting for a chalk outline. I’m fine with it, though. It’s not my first brush with death. I kill interloping insects on a pretty regular basis. I don’t feel good about it unless it’s a centipede, but I do it.
This bee, however, is different. I didn’t kill him, and it’s not like I have a house full of live bees and this is just the one that ate some tainted pollen, got sick and dropped dead in mid-buzz. This guy’s unusual. His origins are a mystery.
Did he crawl through a hole in a wall somewhere and aim for this spot like Jumbo heading to the Elephant Graveyard? Did he drop from the sky like some entomological Amelia Earhart? Was he whacked by a bee-hive gangster and deposited here in an effort to frame me for the crime? I have no idea. It’s an enigma.
It makes me wonder about the other mysterious things we find, like shoes on the road … always one shoe, always on the road, never in a movie theatre or in a shopping mall. I have lost count of the number of times I have driven past a forlorn Nike by a curb, but not once have I stepped out of Eddie Bauer on my way to the food court and stumbled across a lonely penny loafer or a forgotten sling-back pump. It just doesn’t happen. If I had no experience in this world and I needed to make a list of places likely to produce single, lost shoes, the mall would be number one. Where else but in a place with multiple shoe stores do you take off one shoe, and one shoe only, and walk away from it? Nowhere, I say. Yet for all of those times I have taken my little test walk with my original shoe on my left foot and a new contender on the right, never have I returned to my seat to find the shoe I left behind vanished, presumably on the run.
Plus, if a shoe were going on the lam, perhaps to escape prosecution for some fashion crime, a shoe store would be the logical place to get lost. He could blend in with the discount bin, then hop the first out-bound shopping bag and cozy up with a pair of brogues. Easy-peasey.
Interestingly, I’ve never known anyone to lose a shoe, not in a shoe store, not in a street, not anywhere. I’m always losing umbrellas, hats, sunglasses, golf towels and bets on the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Why can’t I ever find them in a gutter? (I’m talking about the lost items, not the Tiger-Cats.) Shouldn’t every gutter be home to a lost umbrella? Sheer numbers would make you think so. Let’s follow this through mathematically:
- Everyone has lost at least one umbrella in their lives, so that’s 30,000,000 lost umbrellas in Canada alone.
- No one I know has ever lost a shoe. I know maybe 200 people well enough to know their footwear histories, so even if everyone else in Canada has lost a shoe, that’s only 29,999,800 lost shoes.
- That’s a ratio of 149,999 lost shoes to every 150,000 lost umbrellas.
Now, I’m pretty sure that if you multiply the denominator by a factor of the square root and divide by the number of provinces and territories before you cancel out the numerator by cubing the population of New Brunswick, it proves that you should damn well see more umbrellas than shoes in the gutter.
Since we don’t see more umbrellas than shoes, we have learned through the magic of mathematics that mysterious forces are at work in our world, forces that clearly collect umbrellas in order to make and discard old shoes, sort of the way owls collect mice to make owl pellets. It’s clear to me, therefore, that we should all be on the lookout for fast-moving, nearly invisible, umbrella-eating creatures who crap out shoes in the street. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense whatsoever.
Now if you give me a few more minutes with my calculator, I’m sure I can explain this dead bee. |
