Good Math, Bad Math — The FOUR Hundredth Anniversary Of The Defenestration of Prague.

By John Derbyshire

04/17/2018

The solution to my March Diary brainteaser is on my personal website here.

This was a neat one: thanks to the friend who passed it on to me. One’s first thought is to go at it with a breaking-rocks approach, piling up chains of probabilities.

If you stand back from it for a few minutes though & meditate on the immensity of the universe and the insignificance of a human life, you see it’s really simple.

That’s the good math. The bad math was in last weekend’s Radio Derb:

We're coming up to the three hundredth anniversary of the Defenestration of Prague, generally taken as the start point of the Thirty Years War …
Among the annoyingly numerous reader responses to that, my favorite was this one:
Mr Derbyshire: I too would rather be living in 1918, but I think you will find we are nearing the four hundredth anniversary of the Defenestration of Prague.

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