They say they come in threes

It's a little past Halloween, but I just noticed the oddest thing. Well, to someone like me who always has numbers dancing around in their head, it's an odd thing. Maybe even a little spooky. 

I was reading an article on the (unlikely) prospect that McCain could pull off an electoral college win even if Obama wins the popular vote as he is expected to do. Actually, there have been a number of pieces on similar topics dealing with the prospect that the race might be tightening and/or the polls might not be entirely accurate (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Anyway, here is one paragraph from the article:

In 2000, Democrat Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote by 537,179 votes. But George W. Bush won the state-by-state electoral balloting that determines the presidency, 271 to 266. The outcome wasn't clear until a 36-day recount awarded Florida, then worth 25 electoral votes, to Bush by just a 537-vote margin.

The first thing I noticed—but had never before noted—was that the "prefix" of Al Gore's margin of victory in the popular vote (i.e., 537) was the same as Bush's official margin of victory in Florida. Sort of a coincidence, wouldn't you say? [I checked online to see if the above numbers were accurate. Wikipedia has a different set but the New York Times cited the same "537" figures as above.]

But then the numbers-crunching persona I have took over and I quickly noticed that 537 divided by 179 (the "suffix" of the number) yielded a quotient of exactly 3. Exactly 3 as in no decimal points left over. 3.000000000000. Three. Tres, さん, tre, 三, 세 개, drei, exatamente 3. 

That's just plain weird. Weirder if you consider three as a bit of a holy or superstitious number (the Holy Trinity, triumvirates, celebrity deaths coming in threes). Does this mean anything? I don't know. Could it be a sign that some computer program was actually controlling our elections? Sure, why not. 

You may remember back in school that if you added up all the digits in a number (like adding up the 5, 3, and 7 of 537 to get 15) and then repeat the process until you finally get a one-digit number (like by adding the 1 and 5 from 15 to get 6), then you can determine if that number is divisible by 3 by seeing if the final one-digit result is divisible by 3 (in this case, 579 is divisible by 3 since 6 is divisible by 3, though this doesn't seem to be relevant). A similar reduction also works to see if the number is divisible by 9.

So 5+3+7 = 15 and 1+5 = 6, and the 537/179 result is 3, which could very well mean three sixes. As in 6, 6, and another 6. Holy shit! 

It doesn't take much to read between the lines what that could mean.

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld are the antichrist!

Anyway, if you don't see Kushibo blogging anymore after this, you know I'm onto something.