Stupid e-mail tricks

Well I had a free moment today, so I thought I'd disect another idiotic e-mail chain letter. This is supposed to dazzle the reader and make him believe in magic I suppose. The only thing missing was the "send this to everyone you know in the next 10 minutes or something bad will happen..." at the end.

So, here's the e-mail I got. It's followed by my explanation:

MATH PROBLEM

HERE IS A MATH TRICK SO UNBELIEVABLE THAT IT WILL STUMP YOU. PERSONALLY I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHO CAME UP WITH THIS




1. GRAB A CALCULATOR. (YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO DO THIS ONE IN YOUR HEAD) 2. KEY IN THE FIRST THREE DIGITS OF YOUR PHONE NUMBER (NOT THE AREA CODE) 3. MULTIPLY BY 80 4. ADD 1 5. MULTIPLY BY 250 6. ADD THE LAST 4 DIGITS OF YOUR PHONE NUMBER 7. ADD THE LAST 4 DIGITS OF YOUR PHONE NUMBER AGAIN.
8. SUBTRACT 250
9. DIVIDE NUMBER BY 2

DO YOU RECOGNIZE THE ANSWER?

Yes, I do. I recognize it because this is stupid and the equation really does nothing. Here's why:

******************

First of all, if you take out the phone number part, the equation equals 10,000. That made me suspicious.

So I looked at the parts of the equation itself.

250 shows up twice. Once it's multiplied, once it's subracted. Why? Because when you add 1 to the phone prefix, and multiply it by 250, you have to back out the extra 250 (because you added 1 and multiplied that 1 250 times).

So, the +1 and the -250 cancel out. Forget them.

The phone suffix shows up twice also. It's added to itself, thus doubling the value. But, since the entire result is divided by 2 at the end, that can be dismissed as an extra step as well.

But what about the 80 and the 250 (multiplied)?

80 * 250 is 20,000. Again, these are the only two siginficant numbers in this equation. That's why you get the same result (10,000) by just going 80 * 250 / 2. Again, keep in mind everything is divided by two. So, it's really 40 * 125.

So what does the 80 * 250 (or 40 * 125) do?

It increases the value of your phone number by a factor of 20,000 (10,000 when divided).

So, here you go:

Take the 1st three digits of your phone number and multiply by 10,000. You get x,xx0,000. Or, as a phone number, you would see: xxx-0000 (where x=your phone prefix). Starting to look familiar?

Because there's nothing left to do but add in the last 4 digits of your phone, you get your phone number.

This is what I call "mental gymnastics".