Publius & Co.

Jen is right and everyone else is wrong (except for my gf).

In her ever-popular Ask Jen! segment, my Munuvian blogsis Jen was asked by Paige:

"A hunter leaves his tent and travels 10 miles south, then ten miles east. At this point, he kills a bear, and then drags the bear 10 miles north to his tent. What color was the bear?"

Jen's answer, based on the information given, could amount to nothing more than a guess, and she made a pretty good one: I'm the first to admit math was never my strong suit, but I think it was a black bear and he's in the wrong tent. Someone will have to check my work and correct me if I'm wrong.

Sounded good to me. I mean, there's no way you can tell the color of a freakin' bear from knowledge only of the path taken. I was especially taken with her declaration the hunter was in the wrong tent.

But not so, according to my Munuvian blogbro Jim, who commented in Jen's original post:

The bear was white. The only place you can walk 10 miles south, 10 miles east and 10 miles north and be back at your starting point is the north pole. Of course there are no bears anywhere near the actual north pole so it's sort of a trick question.

For some strange reason--I assume she got a knock on the head or something--Jen agreed with Jim.

Proclaiming herself wrong was the only time Jen was--uhh--wrong. Her original answer was more correct than Jim's was, and I'll prove it.

In his answer, Jim says the bear was white, and offers as proof the fact that, "The only place you can walk 10 miles south, 10 miles east and 10 miles north and be back at your starting point is the north pole."

That is factually correct. But he continues, "Of course there are no bears anywhere near the actual north pole so it's sort of a trick question."

Jim, my blogbro, an answer based on a false premise is, in itself, almost certainly false (I include the caveat almost certainly because lucky guesses do occur). In this case, though, if you are at the North Pole, with no bears "anywhere near" it (as Jim states, and ten miles away certainly counts as somewhere near the pole in my book), then you can shoot no bear, be it white, black, brown, or blurple.

Therefore, Jim's answer is wrong. I say Jen's answer is more correct, simply because Jim's cannot be correct at all, and at least there is a possibility the bear shot by Paige's theoretical hunter was black.

Further, there's no tent at the North Pole because everyone knows Santa's workshop is located there, and he's expanded something awful lately. There simply is no room for a tent at exactly the North Pole, which is where you'd have to start from in order to walk south, than east, than north, in order to end up exactly where you started. Heck, even if you managed to pitch a tent in the interior office right over the Pole, you'd have to deal with the hallways, other offices, cubicles, reindeer stalls, and the security elves as you tried to leave. You can't walk in a straight line outta there to save your life.

You start from anywhere else, you sure as shit don't end up in your own tent, so Jen was definitely positively, absolutely correct on that part.

For the record, I tried to find data on the population of black bears vs. brown/grizzly vs. polar bears (koala bears are marsupials, so I didn't give my rats ass about them), to see if Jen might have been right about the bear color (more bears of a certain color means there's a better chance one of those would get shot, is how I figured it),and I couldn't find the population data. If lunch were longer maybe, but for now we'll just have to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Posted by Victor at Octubre 27, 2003 05:24 PM