On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Shane Taylor wrote:
> Very tangential to the topic at hand, but I'd never noticed the
> similarity before.
Well it isn't usually true. It's just true here because
1) We're talking about a very simple case, with only two terms; and
2) There is suprising consistency in the comically wide spread between organizer and police estimates. It's remarkable how many times the ratio between them is exactly 5 to 1. Which I think is what accounts for the two methods working out so closely.
This BTW, is how people came up with the classical method in the first place. While joking and trying to parse how far about they were, people realized that if you halved one or double the other you converged on roughly the same number. Which was inherently risible and made it seem like an objective law of some kind.
Michael