THE 2+2.

“PURE MATHEMATICS IS , IN ITS WAY THE POETRY OF LOGICAL IDEAS”
Albert Einstein.
GREED.
You cannot escape it at the moment , everywhere you look , every article you read everybody is simply too fat , we are in the middle of an obesity epidemic. An epidemic, you know like smallpox or Ebola or tuberculosis an epidemic…………
I am on the obese list, I used to be fit and train regularly but unfortunately my work takes me all over the country and leads to lots of hours and irregular ones at that, I eat at the wrong times and I eat many of the wrong things, coupled with the fact that I am greedy and have recently quit smoking it is likely that a fat guy looks back when I peer into the mirror.
I am not surprised by it , I don't consider myself to be a part of an epidemic , my lifestyle doesn't lend itself that well to a lean figure at the moment , my thyroid isn't underactive and I have nothing wrong with my glands, if you fed me into a system builder I would come out exactly where I should !!
UNDERLYING FACTORS.
My 11th birthday was a fairly uneventful affair like many others , my mother was severely ill and while my father did his best as a single man , he was like myself what would these days would be referred to as a “bloke”, my aunt however looked after me like a mother. When she walked in with a parcel that looked like a video cassette I remember being delighted, less so when unwrapping and finding a bloody book inside!! The book however taught me to read, not literally but to actually READ, previously books had been forced down my throat at school and in reality I really thought they had no merit bearing in mind we had a television, in my eyes even the news was more interesting than the stuff school forced upon us.
The book in question was an autobiography of FRANK BRUNO , this was pre Tyson and an early book titled “know what I mean” and was a story of his rise so far , I became hooked and powered through it enjoying every page finding it unimaginable that to read a book could be a recreational pursuit , to me they were “school” things and to be avoided , I am forever grateful to my aunt for buying me that book as it started me off with books and I read hundreds these days as one of the benefits of my aforementioned job is the ability to read a lot due to being on the road and away , if I cannot exercise the body I can at least exercise the mind.
SOLVING A PROBLEM.
When we try to solve the puzzle of a horse race we are effectively a detective with a list of clues and by piecing them together we look to solve the race , as a detective becomes more experienced he will tend to get better at his job , he will be able to detect certain signs and traits and lines of investigation that he will follow systematically, he will however also learn to spot a red herring ,when 2+2 simply don't equal 4 , even though they should no matter which way you crunch them , 2+2 works when it is a guy robbing a grocery store caught on CCTV , but detectives aren't paid for that kind of crime.
I have long since discovered that my aunts purchase of the Bruno book was very deliberate , I was and still am an avid follower of boxing , doing 8 years as an amateur myself. My aunt weighed up the facts , reading is good for kids it expands the mind , Pompey hates reading , but loves sport (indeed as a youngster if it didn't involve Aston Villa or Barry Mcguigan I didn't want to know)………………hmm a book on boxing could be a way to introduce him to reading.
Furthermore once I got the bug for books I was able to apply myself better to the books forced on us by school with ANIMAL FARM and TO KILL A MACKINGBIRD becoming favourites long after I had waved education goodbye, the Bruno book ended up being savaged years later by a hungry Staffordshire bull puppy!
POLITICAINS, THE RIGGS APPROACH.
I'm sure your all familiar with RIGGS , Mel Gibson's maniac cop from the Lethal Weapon movies, his approach to solving a problem was very much the opposite of my aunt and along the lines of He likes sport but doesn't like books , I will hold his head under water until he agrees to like books !!
The evidence of the nation becoming hugely fat is contradicted by the fact that Gym memberships are at an all time high mainly through the shallow make up of society and advice from government that if you eat well and exercise regularly you will be slimmer and look more like your idols.
HELP YOUR FIGURE, GET A LIBRARY CARD.
My view is slightly different, if you want to be slimmer join a library. The approach of successive governments hasn't worked, despite all of the literature and iniatives we have never been fatter, in spite of the seemingly endless line of gyms on every street.
Yet the 2+2 works, it goes something like this,
Exercise + healthy eating= fitness which in turns looks like = slim i.e, healthy=acceptable in society.
Starvation + vomiting = Bulimia =slim i.e. healthy =acceptable in society
What has happened here is the equation is not complete, but the result remains the same, clearly if your friend asked you how they could lose a bit of weight you are unlikely to suggest self induced vomiting and food depravation, but the cosmetic result is the same, I mean think about it how often does somebody express a desire to eat more healthily without linking it to weight loss? Imagine if somebody suggested you do 10 hours a week in a gym for no cosmetic benefit? forget that you want results.
So how does a library come into play? In a word knowledge, so many people jump into data collecting by starting at the end result rather than treating it as an organic exercise, I have used health as an example because of the contradiction in terms of fitness organisations x fat people, clearly more gyms should mean healthier and slimmer people.
To analyze this phenomenon an underlying factor is being ignored and that is the amount of processed food we eat which we are not really designed to digest effectively and because the taste would be upsetting on the palette they are packed with flavours we historically love, salt and sugar, if gym memberships stayed the same the obesity rate would be through the roof , no government wants to be steering the rudder of an epidemic so a drive starts to get everybody training, it is highly likely that if an insistence was made on only fresh produce gyms could cease to exist and the obesity rate would drop. The data it could be argued isn't linked to gyms at all, only to suggest that the more gyms we have the fatter we get (another classic 2+2 there!!)What people tend to do especially economists is work backwards from the answer until they are in a position to ask the question and propagate themselves as sage like in saying that they told us this (Look at our numbers !!).
The epidemic is actually an age old epidemic , one of idleness within the nation with regard to investigating or researching anything and a culture of having to be rewarded and to be able to see or touch the benefit, training the mind doesn't give this , after reading for two hours a day every day for twelve months you will see no benefit cosmetically to your psychical make up (indeed the inactivity may see a decline!!) , in the age of the internet you can get a wealth of data on anything , a seemingly never ending database that can prove anything to be true and give numbers to back it. Investigations become a data mining exercise of the most basic 2+2 sums simplified to produce an answer that is already prevalent, similar to when a nightclub stamps your hand going in and you can move in and out all night without ever having said hand inspected again.
2+2 HIGH STREET STYLE.
When a mug studies a card he does a number of 2+2 equations, usually very lazy equations that end in a stream of abuse towards horse racing being a scam, the jockey, the trainer, everybody involved should his charge get beaten, I have lost count of the number of punters that come out with the old chestnut “must be in the first three in the betting”, citing the high winning chance of these horses. The first three in the betting do win a large percentage of races, certainly more than half, but the data means nothing, it is completely irrelevant.
How many races these have 5 runners or less? Imagine a 4 runner race , the first three in the betting will make up 80% of the field , in three runner races of which there are plenty 100% of the field is equal to the 60% “edge” you hope to gain with this 2+2 logic.
If all things are perfectly symmetrical and a race can be predicted in advance down to the number of fallers , the number of runners and the exact finishing order of the runners including disqualifications then the first three in the betting makes perfect sense as a selection tool , but if you I would suggest the straight tri cast and enjoy the private island and the mansion, for the rest of us horse racing rarely responds to the 2+2 alone , which is a shame because if this pastime was that easy we could all retire.