CompuServe Messages

Aha, now THAT brings to mind a recent TV show I chuckled over. It was a college classroom in which the professor presented the old "what color is the bear" problem: "A man leaves his home, travels one mile south, one mile east, one mile north. Having returned to his home, he sees a bear and shoots it. What color was the bear?" Now the logical proof he applied was that the only location on earth this could happen was the North Pole, and therefore the bear was white. That's chuckle number one: you can say that in ALL PROBABILITY the bear was white… but it's not a given. Anyway, at this point a student jumps in and claims there is insufficient evidence to support the conclusion, and proceeds to prove that there is ANOTHER location on Earth which fit the conditions: The man's home is at a distance of 1.16 miles north of the SOUTH pole. He travels one mile south (.16 miles from the pole), one mile east (making a circle about the pole with a circumference of one mile), one mile north (returning to his home), and shoots the bear; therefore, the color of the bear is indeterminant. The student's logic was remarkable, but wrong. Kudos to whoever realized that there are two locations on earth which suited the conditions, and had the question been "Where did the man live", the answer would have been indeterminant. BUT, since there ARE no bears on the south pole, and even if there were they would in all probablility be white, the conditions have not changed: the bear was white (give that the phrase "in all probability" should be inserted). At the time I was chuckling over this, I was wondering how many people caught this… and decided it was probably only a statistically insignificant portion of the people with warped minds like mine. 8)