Friday, April 29, 2016

135. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: Struggling with the Zeros

Duterte has backtracked on his initial denial of the allegations made by Sen. Trillanes about his Php 211M  deposit in his BPI bank account and has said that the account exists and it has about a little less than Php 200 M. When asked to explain about his initial statement that the account had barely Php 50,000, he said he was confused with the zeros. This curious incident highlights a potential problem in the event that Duterte is elected President. He probably needs to attend a math seminar to re-orient him about the  zeros, considering that the annual budget is PHP 3 trillion which has  twelve zeros, the national debt is 77 Billion USD which has nine zeros in US dollars and more in pesos, and the population is 100 million which has eight zeros. Thus, the problem would be how to help him cope with zeros. Should we call his former math teacher from the Ateneo de Davao for him to teach the president about something the president should have learned in grade three? Should the better option be making custom made  calculators with keys shaped like women's lips for him to get the hang of it easily? Shall we order instead an abacus with bullets as beads or will it be better to appoint to the cabinet his seatmates from grade school math so they can make the calculations for him and he can just copy from them like the old days. Another proposal on the table is to ask him to imagine the zeros as corpses of the people he has killed, which might actually be a good idea. Whatever the solution is, come June 30, 2016, the math educators of the Republic are going to be in a crisis as the people have elected a president who gets confused with zeros.

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