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On Theft
8/12/05
by Shaw

I have been robbed. Or as Clay, Tardio, KWo, and the 27 (all lawyers) might correct me, I have been burglarized. For the 4th time.

You see, Clay has been asking, nay, demanding me, since the inception of this site, to write a column that relates in some way to mathematics.

Not because he likes mathematics, but because he thinks it's funny. Just the idea of writing down a calculation makes Clay chuckle. A graph makes him openly laugh. And to put either of these things into the already hysterical context of a Deadly Hippos column--well, I don't need to tell you how Clay would feel about that. But, as I rarely come upon "joke math" in my studies as a grad student, I haven't had the opportunity to put any math into this site yet. Until, you may have guessed, today. I was burglarized this weekend, and the mathematics of the situation seemed humorous to me, so I will share with you a brief analysis of the situation. I hope you think it is as laugh-out-loud, stomp-on-your-testes, bash-them-until-they're-black-and-blue funny as I do.

The utter hilarity of the burglaries comes about not by the list of items taken from me, but in the numbers associated with the thefts. In 10th grade, I left my wallet containing a $50 bill inside an unlocked locker at a YMCA while I played racquetball for 2 hours. Of course that is the last I ever saw of my $50 bill.

Expense to me: $50
Windfall for criminal: $50 (hilarious!)

I would not be stolen from again until I became a graduate student in mathematics, i.e. comedy, 4 years ago this winter. I was at a Nelly Furtado concert (perhaps funny for different non-mathematical reasons, if one can imagine such a thing) and I parked my car in the pseudo-ghetto. The concert was at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC, which if you know the area, is a few blocks away from Howard University. The campus of Howard itself is fine--as a former employee of HU I can attest that I would feel safe walking around there and have parked my car on many an occasion on campus at night with no problems or worries. Which isn't to say that I was not usually the only white person within several blocks, but I doubt there is much animosity toward white people among the HU community (as there is in other communities mostly populated by minorities in DC) because no one is seriously worried about gentrification invading the neighborhood surrounding an HBCU. Similarly, a few blocks over is the hip U Street Cardozo area with yuppie white people bars, yuppie black people bars, yuppie everyone bars, and Ben's Chili Bowl--a veritable arts community that my granola crunching upstate New Yorker kin would just love to visit and put up a crappy art gallery (crappy referring not to the gallery itself but to the specific type of art in which it would specialize) or an organic food store or whatever. Pretty safe. But the 9:30 Club is bordered on a third side by a strange black hole of criminal activity that most Washingtonians avoid and I believe exists solely to prey on idiots that only go to that neighborhood to see concerts. This is also the only area in which you can ever find a parking spot on a weekend evening. So I naively parked my car on Vermont Avenue, and went in to enjoy the show with my girlfriend. When we came out I noticed several things were amiss, written in the order I noticed them:

The last observation was the one that tipped me off that my car had been burglarized. So I lost my stereo (which was a gift, hence free) and the rear vent window, which despite being the smallest piece of glass in my car was the most expensive to replace ($100). I later discovered that my trunk had been opened and the thief had taken a bag from it. A bag that was homemade (hence the ugliest thing you will ever see--I had an authority figure once who used say "you look uglier than a homemade football"--picture a homemade football the color of vomit and that is the bag that was stolen from my trunk). Since all he got was the stereo faceplate and the worthless bag, I assume he can't have gotten more than $30, since the faceplate is relatively useless without the proper base. As far as I can tell the only thing to do with a stereo faceplate is sell it to someone dumber than you.

Expense to me: $100
Windfall for criminal: $30 (getting funnier...)

The most recent crime visited upon me was this weekend, when my apartment's storage facility was broken into (also using a crowbar), ransacked, and vandalized. The only thing of value in there was my bike. The perpetrators took everything off of the bike that I had put on it:

Then to cap off their brilliant crime they destroyed my rear tire, as if to ensure that I couldn't get on the bike and chase them. If I ran a pawnshop, I would give them $20 for the entire (clearly stolen) package.

Expense to me: $120.45
Windfall for criminal: $20 (quite humorous!)

Are you starting to see the hugely funny mathematical pattern? If you have been keeping track, each time the damage to me is more expensive, the financial windfall for the burglar goes down in price!!! HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH! (This is called an inverse relationship, for my "Mathematics for Elementary School Education" students.)

Finally, the capstone. Last year, someone invaded the math department mailroom and stole something that cost me $150. Something that only a Mathematics graduate student could possibly want, and more specifically something only a Mathematics graduate student at the University of Maryland could want, and even in that population only about 5% want them. A whole box of shirts like this:

Expense to me: $150 (brilliant!)
Windfall for criminal: $0 (preposterous!)

In order to realize the full humor potential and make Clay leave a trail of urine from his desk to the bathroom, I hope you will appreciate the line graph below, depicting the ridiculously funny relationship between incurred expenses and financial windfall.

What's the lesson in all this? Next time you leave the house, just put a $50 bill out on the table. It's better for you and it's better for your potential thieves.

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