This essay isn’t to explain the solution to the Monty Hall problem—you can look that up anywhere—but to ask a related question: why does it seem to drive some people crazy? Why do they get so attached to their wrong answers, and so upset by the correct answer? That’s weird, right? People don’t usually care enough about math problems to get worked up over them, but there’s something about this particular problem that really pushes people’s buttons.

Today is the last day when the number of people alive will start with a seven. Sometime late Tuesday afternoon, or perhaps early Wednesday morning, the population will cross the eight billion mark. When I was a kid, the number they taught us in school was five billion. By the time I was in college, it was up to six, and a decade ago it hit seven. Now it’s at eight.

se-man-tic (si-man’tik) adj.     1. Of or relating to meaning, especially meaning in language. Programming destroys meaning. When we program, we first replace concepts with symbols and then replace those symbols with arbitrary codes — that’s why it’s called coding. At its worst programming is write-only: the program accomplishes a task, but is incomprehensible to humans. See, for example, the story of Mel. Such a program is correct, yet at the same time meaningless.