Bad Glacier

Other than The Daily Show and Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, I don’t watch much TV. I get my news, music, and much of my entertainment online. But I was in Cleveland this weekend and saw a few shows (there are few things more fun than relaxing with my girlfriend, watching TV and mocking everything we can). I don’t have anything interesting to say about law school, so I’d like to write about TV.

First off is “Numb3rs”, CBS’s new show about a math professor who, in his spare time, uses mathematics to fight crime with his FBI agent brother. Yeah, it’s about as realistic as you’d expect.

I guess CBS is trying to stick with the “CSI” template by showing another side of criminal investigations (I’ve got something to write about CSI, too. Later.). But math? C’mon. The show is apparently based on real-life events, but the episode I saw (yeah, I’m basing this post on one episode. Pshh, I don’t have to try to be fair.) had the math genius using his huge brain to predict where bank robbers would strike next. His model worked; the FBI confronted the bank robbers in the middle of their next heist. But the theives had backup, so his model didn’t work after all! Now, you might say that since his model was only meant to predict the location of the next robbery, it worked just fine. But you’re wrong.

So what does a failed-FBI-agent-slash-math-professor do now? Well, he certainly doesn’t continue teaching or work on a new model that tries to predict the theives’ escape plan. Instead, he lectures his brother on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (wait, that’s physics, not math), stops going to his lectures, and starts work on “P = NP?“, a famously unsolved (possibly unsolvable) problem in theoretical computer science. I’d think that after such a spectacular failure, he’d work on something a little less… um… impossible. But that’s just me.

All in all, I didn’t really like the show. It was boring and it felt like the math was forced into the show to provide a gimmick. All he did was find a pattern, anyways. Bah.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2005 at 4:04 pm and is filed under TV Shows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.