This is not a blockbuster revelation, just a little daydreaming...
I'm a computer programmer and a sort of amateur mathematician, so
I'm always adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing
numbers to pass the time.
Especially when I'm sitting on the stationary bike at the gym,
hoping and praying that the time will go by quicker. If the timer
is set for 10 minutes, I start counting down the fractions,
thinking: at 1:00 I'm 10% done, at 2:00 I'm 20% done, etc. When I'm
20% done, that's one fifth, but even better, I can tell myself I
just have to do what I did *four* more times. "One-fifth" doesn't
sound as good as "four more times".
What's the point of all this? The point is, when you're starting
from a round number (a multiple of ten, say, like 10 or 100 or
1000), and you chop off a tenth or you add on a tenth, you end up
with math problems involving numbers one away from 10 - ninths or
elevenths. When you start off with a nice round number and you chop
off or tack on a fraction, you no longer have that nice round
number to work with anymore - the original nice round number is
bigger or smaller by that fraction, and all your previous fractions
are out of whack now.
A typical situation is where you bump up a number by 10%, like when
you go from 100 to 110. Now if you've used up 10 units of that,
you're looking at 1/11, not 1/10.
OK, so what's your point? My point is that ninths and elevenths
come up a lot when you're starting with a multiple of ten and
bumping it up or down by 10% - something we do in a lot of
situations.
When you write out 1/11 as a decimal, you get 0.09090909... which
looks really cool. The fraction 2/11 looks like 0.1818181818...
which also looks pretty cool.
Which brings us to the mysterious electoral number 18,181 which
crops up in so many suspicious elections in Texas. Some people have
ventured an explanation by noticing that a=1 and h=8 in the
alphabet, giving "ahaha".
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00064.htm
I think there's might be a more mathematical way of looking at
this. 18,181 is 200,000/11 (if you truncate it, instead of rounding
it. Rounding would give 18,181.81 = 18,182 - but let's just assume
Republican hackers are too stupid to know that rule about rounding
up when it's over a half, and they just truncate all the time.)
That, in my opinion, is what's so special about 18,181. It's not a
weird number because it's a palindrome or because it maps to ahaha
- it's an important number because it results when you're dividing
a nice round number by 11 - a situation that often happens when
you're incrementing or decrementing some starting number by 10%.