urbeskate

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he was unfolding sheets of paper on the bus, smoothing them with the back of his hand. complicated tables - columns, rows, labels, blank spaces - the pages loosely sheafed with a binder clip

"i spent 11 years analyzing the trends" he said

except he said it in spanish of course. because the bus was in mexico. we were all in mexico, hurtling down calle morales at a definitely unsafe speed

"and it looks like random chance, which mostly it is. but there are other things. thin threads that govern us, very gently, without our ever knowing it"

then he pulled out a handful of lottery tickets and unfolded these too. nobody else seemed to notice him

on an early page he wrote down the numbers, tidy into their little columns, careful to stay within the lines. then he flipped wildly, consulting labels hand-written into the corners of each page. he was looking for something

"you see, the numbers never repeat in the same order. this has never happened once in the lottery's history. it's statistically possible, sure. but it doesn't happen. the universe favors innovation, it prefers the new"

his language started to escape me here. he said more about this - about entropy, kismet, the dissolution of pattern - but my spanish couldn't keep up. my comprehension relys so heavily on context and suddenly here were estrellas cruce and alogoritmo condendado and i was lost

but i knew he was speaking beautifully. his face was exploding with energy, his tone flecked with passion: he clearly believed. a baby was crying in the background

"y tambien hay el ley de Benford"

this iceberg of english snapped me back into focus. Benfords Law?

"si si si si, the universal, statistical preference towards 1s, 2s and 3s. uno dos tres. all of this has been proven with much larger sets than this. i can without hesitation weight the smaller numbers. the system is built to account for this"

and i noticed this. yes, the pages towards the front were well handled

"it's a system of reduction, no? i have it all charted out. will it require an element of providence? sure. but it's a machine that is narrowing towards the truth. each time you can eliminate an option, the path becomes more clear. every day i'm more certain of what to do next"

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atm1