Governator turns Swearminator
Arnold Schwarzenegger is in trouble for sending an email to a political opponent with a hidden message.
It appears harmless enough ... beginning “For some time now” and concluding by saying “I believe that it is unnecessary to sign this measure at this time”.
But examined closely, the first letters on seven successive lines in the body of the e-mail spell out the words “Fuck you”. It’s rather surprising that the recipient of the e-mail, San Francisco’s Democratic Assemblyman, Tom Ammiano, spotted this, unless he was tipped off. Usually, people who pull this trick can’t resist boasting to friends about it, and the truth emerges.
Arnie’s press secretary claims it was just an unfortunate coincidence, saying that the Governor has had to write so many vetoes recently that something like this “was bound to happen”. Recent e-mails from the Governor, examined in the same way, spell out words such as “poet” and “soap”, he says. These things happen.
What are the odds? The Independent quotes a figure of a mere 8 billion to one that the message could have appeared by chance. But I’m afraid that defence - if it is one - won’t wash. It assumes that all letters are equally common at the start of a word, so works out the odds as 26 to the power of seven.
In fact, some letters are much commoner at the start of words than others. If we assume that each line started with a new word (ie there were no hyphenations), the actual odds are the result of multiplying the frequencies with which the seven letters used occur at the start of words.
F is the first letter in 3.779 per cent of English words, so its frequency is one in 26, roughly. But K is the first letter in only 0.690 per cent of English words, so its frequency is one in 144.
The real odds against Arnie’s message being an accident are, therefore, one in 26 ×67×28×144×61×15 ×67, which comes to roughly one in 430 billion. Has Arnie written that many e-mails?
The odds against the word soap are a mere 70,000 to one, and poet 187,000 to one. It’s plausible that they could occur accidentally. But Fuck You? I’m afraid not.
Mr Ammiano isn’t bothered. “Kudos to the Governor for his creative use of coincidence” he said. All credit to California politics - over here, we’d have had a complaint to the Speaker of the House of Commons by now. And if the recipient had been, say, Harriet Harman, I dread to imagine the consequences.
Anonymous (not verified) wrote,
Thu, 29/10/2009 - 17:24
Whilst I don't doubt that the evidence is certainly not in favour of Mr Schwarzenegger being the victim of an unfortunate coincidence, I think to say it is quite as large as 430 billion to 1 against is unfair. The problem is that you are approaching the issue with the benefit of hindsight. Indeed, if we had originally predicted that he would write 'fuck you' in the email, the odds are indeed 430 billion to 1. However, if we simply regard this as the occurrence of a meaningful 7-letter word or phrase, rather than the specific phrase 'fuck you', the odds reduce dramatically. I confess I haven't worked out the actual figure (perhaps someone else fancies the challenge), but if we took all the possible combinations of letters in a 7-letter string (weighted by frequency of use at the start of a word) and divided by all of these that would form a recognizable word or phrase, I suspect we would end up with a figure significantly less than 430 billion. Needless to say however, the fact that this hidden message does seem to relate rather well to the overall tone of the letter does raise more than a hint of suspicion.
Nigel Sedgwick (not verified) wrote,
Thu, 29/10/2009 - 18:48
I have another, and slightly different challenge.
The acrostic is line-initial and, presumably supposedly and perhaps even truly, is caused by the normal operation of a word processor's line-wrap operation. Given that, short words are more likely to appear at the ends of lines, where they can just fit in. This means that line-initial words will be somewhat longer than average. I think this, very likely, biases the statistics more in favour of words beginning with the relevant consonants (c, f, k, y). Likewise, I suspect that word-initial 'o' and especially 'u' are more common on longer words than are the other vowels (a, e, i).
Thus, 1 in 430 billion is likely to be understating the probability, though I do agree that 1 in 8 billion is likely to be overstating it.
Best regards
Mike O'Neill (not verified) wrote,
Fri, 30/10/2009 - 11:08
The above discussion highlights the common mistake of calculating, after the fact, the chance that a particular something happened rather than calculating the chance that a particular class of something would happen.
So the chance that the initial letters spelled out "fuck you" is very,very low (whatever the actual chance really is) but the chance that they would spell out something (anything) insulting or derogatory about the recipient is much higher. Any of these would be taken in a similar light so you must calculate the chance of the class not the particular. Still very low though.
Robin Morris (not verified) wrote,
Wed, 09/12/2009 - 18:06
If we take as the class all seven letter words, then the scrabble dictionary ( http://www.math.toronto.edu/jjchew/scrabble/lists/common-7.html ) contains 24,029 seven letter words. Assuming each letter is equally likely, the chance of getting a recognizable word is then 24029/26^7, or about 1 in 300,000. And while no one would have made a fuss if the seven letters were "toccate", this probably does provide a reasonable lower-bound.
Post new comment