Let us all love sao paulo, shall we? A robbery tale followed by an inspiring idea.

I was just robbed by an armed man. No big surprise for a Sao Paulo's citizen. The police didn't care shit either. Somehow I was a bit surprised with that...

I had a great phone to be localized, a moto razr hd. No batteries to remove, cyanogenmod didn't allow it to be turned off (it always turns itself back on). I could have improved upon removing the SIM card by breaking something on the clips hole, but well... It was enough so I did even pinpoint his likely home or place where he could stop and find a way to remove the chip. Not a cop nearby, not the 190 (like 911 around here) and not a third cop over the phone would care enough.

Very luckily, that's all he robbed.

The whole robbery was anything like the 3 stooges. I was walking a dark street with a friend and being very cautious. When we got to the light side, very close to a train station (those are generally very safe here in Sao Paulo) and I relaxed. That's when he appeared. I was pushing him away, as I noticed it was a robbery... I had many people attempt to rob me, I fight and never lost anything... But then he showed his gun. A revolver, not much different from that image on the side, from what I can tell. I don't know guns, but I knew that was one. Well, I entered "victim mode" and was ready to give him everything. He had hidden the gun soon after showing it to us.

But then I noticed he was a stooge. He talked slow, not very frightening. I was assaulted by non-armed boys who did much better, and got 2 bucks out of pity from me, while they wanted the same phone. But that's another story...

The robber looked all right. Like most armed ones, as I hear. He didn't look like the usual thief, he had the appearance of a regular citizen "of good". And he definitely wasn't ready to do what he was doing. I gave my phone first. Then, when I noticed he was slow, so was I. I slowly picked my wallet and showed to him. "Look, I got no money, can I keep it?". He hesitated.

A homeless came by. He stood right there, in the middle of the assault, yelling in low voice, like a very drunk person, but seemed to be sober. He was mumbling "stop that, don't assault them" or something like that. The robber got confused, I saved my wallet. He asked for the bags. My friends bag had only clothes. He gave up on her, asked for mine. "What you got worth anything there?" I showed him the iPad. He took the whole bag.

That's when a woman came running and screaming "thief, thief", and he started to run away. I saw that and ran after both. The robber stopped, was going to pick the gun, but hesitated again. Turned around, and continued on running away. We followed him very closeby, few steps away from the "Paraiso" (Paradise) subway entrance. He passed by it, turned back, dropped my bag and went down.

The crazy lady asked me if her purse was in my bag. I stopped to check. Of course it wasn't, he didn't have any purse when he approached me and my friend! We continued to try and follow him, but it was too late.

I had no idea what I was going to do if I reached him, but inside the station I would sure start to yell "thief" as well, in hope a security guard would appear. Well, after that it was a lot of frustrated attempts to make any kind of security or police to do their work efficiently. They're not here to work - just like airport security isn't there for anything other than theater. One cop even told me "This is brazil".

I'll just skip all that.

There must be a more intelligent way to deal with this...

First, I'll take a few extra measures. From now on I'll keep in mind I'll just lose everything I walk with. And deal with that. This is easy to think about, there's no real challenge there, except you have to police yourself every day. It's like going to a poor and unknown country streets - you take as little as needed, and you think as if you're going to lose it today. Every day be glad if you didn't. Sure, you can take extra steps to protect against dumb robbers (such as mine up there) but you have to keep in mind sometimes they won't be so dumb.

That's not what I mean by "a more intelligent way"...

Only for "geniuses" and not for stack exchangers

I came up with this quora question the other day about mathematicians and how they, along with most educated people, have some kind of difficulty on communicating with lesser educated ones (a.k.a. the public).

And most feedback I had there was not much different from what I had on a kind of similar post I've created months ago on stackexchange - educated people were putting me down, even while I got the sensation most of them didn't really get my question at all.

Now, it's no big news to anyone who read this blog (a.k.a. myself and my mom) that I suck at making myself understandable. I mean, it really isn't your fault if you can't understand whatever I say or write. I do believe I write enough you should be able to understand, but I often get myself with too many ambiguous messages when I re-read what I wrote, after understanding my dear readers point of view.

In any case, I think I also got to an answer to satisfy myself for that quora question: people are intellectually lazy. I'll write more about that later on, but it has a lot to do with definition of intelligence...

For now, I just want to start making a copy of all that. Because I like this subject and you never know when stackexchange community, quora or the internet will shut you down. So, redundancy copies! Whatever I write in my blog is automagically saved in my computer. ;-)

So, this is the question and answer I had on SEN before it got deleted, and how I can still see it right now:

“Only for geniuses: if 2 = 6, 3 = 12, etc, then 9 equals?” [closed] 

up vote-8down votefavorite	Last format I've seem of this was from this image: What's the correct answer, and why? homework shareeditundeleteflagtimeline edited Feb 27 at 3:54 asked Feb 26 at 13:03 Cawas 1113
closed as primarily opinion-based by Calvin Lin, Tomás, Clement C., Samrat Mukhopadhyay, Davide Giraudo Feb 26 at 13:40 Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit your question or leave a comment. deleted by Community♦ Mar 9 at 3:00
	5 Considering that OP chose to answer this and claim that there is only 1 correct answer, I'm voting to close as this is "primarily opinion based". –  Calvin Lin Feb 26 at 13:08 @calvin i don't see what's wrong here. Can you please help me out? –  Cawas Feb 26 at 17:07    comments disabled on deleted / locked posts / reviews

1 Answer

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The question is very ill formatted in every aspect and the answer could be anything you want. Among common answers people give to this question, maybe the simplest one is 90, and at least 2 ways to achieve that: n * (n + 1) = S 2 * (2 + 1) = 6 3 * (3 + 1) = 12 ... 6 * (6 + 1) = 42 9 * (9 + 1) = 90 Or with algorithms, which is simpler to think about than to write... n = 2; S = 6; loop: print; n = S + (6 + (n - 3) * 2); which, in each line, will bring n and S values of (formula in middle): n formula S comment 2 6 (starting condition) 3 = 6 + (6 + (3 - 3) * 2) = 12 ( 6 + 6) 4 = 12 + (6 + (4 - 3) * 2) = 20 (12 + 8) 5 = 20 + (6 + (5 - 3) * 2) = 30 (20 + 10) 6 = 30 + (6 + (6 - 3) * 2) = 42 (30 + 12) ... (42 + 14, 56 + 16) 9 = 72 + (6 + (9 - 3) * 2) = 90 (72 + 18) To get to 9, we ignore 7 and 8 results, but not the maths / algorithm behind it. There are two other common answers: 56 and 72. You just ignore the left column skipping from 6 to 9. It's probably easier to understand seeing the numbers: solution 56 - completely ignore left column 1: 2 * (2 + 1) = 6 2: 3 * (3 + 1) = 12 ... 5: 6 * (6 + 1) = 42 6: 7 * (7 + 1) = 56 And then: solution 72 - ignore left column only inside (n + 1) 1: 2 * (2 + 1) = 6 2: 3 * (3 + 1) = 12 ... 5: 6 * (6 + 1) = 42 6: 9 * (7 + 1) = 72 shareeditundeleteflag deleted Mar 9 at 3:00 edited Feb 27 at 3:48 community wiki 2 revsCawas

9 I think you're wrong, it should be 0. oeis.org/A077252 –  Daniel R Feb 26 at 13:12 1 This answer does not explain the use of the equals sign in the question - it gives formulae which compute to the numbers of the right hand side, but it doesn't explain why those formulae are equal to what appears on the left hand side. –  Mark Bennet Feb 26 at 13:28  If there is only one correct answer, then I think it should be: "anything you want". –  Etienne Feb 26 at 13:53 What did I do or say that was so wrong, guys? Daniel seem to be joking. @markbennet The equal sign is just wrong, but it makes no difference for the logic. But what you mean about left side formula? –  Cawas Feb 26 at 22:13    You didn't say or do anything "wrong". Apparently, many people just don't like this kind of questions. I agree with them (even though I didn't downvote). It just makes no sense to say that there is only one "correct answer". It is pretty easy to produce infinitely many simple algebraic formulas f(n) that will give the values 6,12,20,30,42 for n=2,3,4,5,6 and ... anything you want for n=7. –  Etienne Feb 26 at 22:59 Thanks @etienne. Do you think I should delete all this? –  Cawas Feb 27 at 3:34    Well, I really don't know. It's up to you. –  Etienne Feb 27 at 7:53