N is the number of civilizations in the Milkyway Galaxy that we may be able to communicate with
R* is the average rate of star formation
f_p is the fraction of those stars with planets
n_e is the average number of planets per star that can support life
f_l if the fraction of planets that can support life that actually do support life
f_i is the fraction of planets with life that develop intelligent life
f_c is the fraction of civilizations that develop a detectable technology (usually some sort of radio communication)
L is the length of time such civilizations send those signals into space.

What does this have to do with the sexual exploits of the governor of South Carolina?

Well, the recent spate of politicians who have been unfaithful to their spouses caused me to wonder just how many politicians are out there who are cheating on their spouses. With this in mind I’ve decided to pay homage to professor Drake and formulate a political infidelity equation. Without further ado:

where:

N is the number of politicians who are currently cheating on their spouses
P is the total number of politicians currently in office
f_m is the fraction of those who are currently married
f_u is the fraction of those who are unfaithful in any given year.

Just for fun, let’s put some numbers to this.

We’ll estimate P based on the number of politicians who are on the national scene. For this I’ll include all the US senators (100) and US congressmen (435), all the state governors (50) and all the state lieutenant governors (50). This may not be a complete count as the President and his cabinet, as well as the Supreme Court justices and a few nationally known mayors may also qualify, but this value of P is close enough. P = 635.

f_m can probably be found by searching public records of the congress and other political offices, but we can also estimate it from the same fraction of the US population who is married. A quick search turns up this web page from the US Census Bureau which states that 50% of the adults in New York state are unmarried and that this is the highest percentage of any state. I’d expect there to be more married politicians than the national average so we’ll just guess that 40% of politicians are single, leaving 60% married.

f_u can similarly be estimated from national trends. A quick web search turns up this page which states that 3% of women cheat and 5% of men cheat on their spouse in any given year (actually this page cites 1997 as the year, but we’ll assume this applies to any given year). We’ll ignore the male/female ratio for politicians and just take the average of these 2 numbers. Thus f_u is 4%. Note this particular web page has many other statistics on it. Many that state a higher infidelity statistic than 4%. This is just a piece for fun, so I didn’t dig into these numbers too much, but one statistic states that 22% of men have an affair at least once during their married lives. We’re really not interested in this number because we probably don’t care about a politician who has an affair after they’re out of office. Similarly, we probably don’t care about a politician who had an affair a few years ago but is currently faithful. Thus the number we do care about is the fraction of married people who are currently cheating. A number that is reasonably lower than the total fraction of married people who cheat at some point during their marriages.

Combining all of these we get:
635 * 0.6 * 0.04 = 15

or 15 politicians should be currently having affairs. To date (within the past 12 months) we are aware of only 2 who similarly qualify. Sanford and John Ensign, all the others who have been in the news recently fall outside of the methodology we’re using here. Eliot Spitzer’s indiscretion, for example, occured a little over 15 months ago. ABCnews has a good photo link on recent politicians who cheat.

Mark Sanford’s picture comes courtesy of the South Carolina Governor’s Office.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you can probably imagine what comes next.

$107 billion is nearly 9 times larger than $12 billion. The pile of pills on the right is no where near 9 times the size of the pile of pills on the left.

Let’s detour for a bit. If you’re the least bit interested in communicating graphically you should listen to directors commentaries on DVDs. Sometimes even better is to listen to critics commentaries on DVDs (critics commentaries are available for older classical movies). It soon becomes clear that directors have full control over the content of each shot in a movie. They control the lighting, shadows, color, furniture placement, what’s visible outside windows, etc. Next time you watch a movie think about that. Nothing you’re seeing is done by accident. Even if the scene looks like an outdoor shot it has been staged, arranged and orchestrated to be precisely what the director desires.

Such is the case with the graphic shown above. On TV it was an animation lasting about 12 seconds. The pills dropped from above, first in the $12 billion pile then in the $107 billion pile. At first glance it looks like mostly green pills with a few red and yellow ones thrown in. But on closer inspection the green pills have dollar signs on them. Someone made the decision to use dollar signs. The background looks like the White House, someone made the decision to use that backdrop. In front of the house are red and white bars, either reminiscent of a cross walk but with red thrown in or perhaps reminiscent of the US flag. Someone made the decision to add a red and white street. On the curb of this street there are little stars, further supporting the case for the street to be reminiscent of a flag. Again, someone made this decision too. The point is this graphic was not casually thrown together, it was planned.

Why that planning didn’t extend to show the $107 billion as 9 times larger than the $12 billion is a mystery. I suspect its because most of the people behind the scenes are intimidated by all things math. And this just barely qualifies as math as there are *only* numbers involved. Here’s a headline “ABC News Tricks Public, States Health Care is 300% Less Expensive.”

Below is the same image more appropriately scaled.

While the deficit is a serious issue, this choice of visual metaphor is funny on so many levels.

• We have an older and respected senator relying on younger (oriented) and comical video imagery
• The metaphor is mixed up. Eating the dots is a GOOD thing, yet he’s using it as a bad thing.
• More mixed up: Pacman is used as a pie-chart… the more the mouth is closed the bigger he is yet the less he eats. And the less threatening he looks.
• Pie can’t grow beyond 100%. This is a chart showing debt as a fraction of GDP. It is entirely possible for this to grow beyond 100%, yet pac-man’s mouth can’t get any more closed than 100%. (a problem Voinovich stumbles across in an earlier presentation using the same charts.)

Why do our congressional representatives rely on such goofy imagery? I believe deep down inside they are very uncomfortable with math. Most senators are lawyers, not engineers or scientists. Senator Voinovich himself is an attorney. I believe they are very uncomfortable in communicating numerical information to the public. That may explain why they do it poorly, but why pacman? Well, perhaps if you can’t convey useful information about numbers you can at least convey the emotion you want your viewers to feel. Get the sense of dread that your budget eating pacman is about to be eaten by the ghosts? In the video game it always caused my heart to race as the ghosts got close to me, but in this context? What part of the deficit do the ghosts represent again?

For those interested inVoinovich’s full speech, here it is courtesy of Cspan’s site:

(Note he switches to a different topic at the very end of this clip.)