2 # B ADD

There's a cartoon where two mice, Hubie and Bertie, have eaten so much cheese they can't stand any more and decide that there's nothing more to live for and so go find a cat to end their lives. But the cat is suspicious of mice that want to be eaten and so refuses to eat them. The dog sees the result and tries to figure things out. The mice hate cheese. The mice want to be eaten. The cat refuse to eat the mice. And the cat, I think I recall, even wants the dog to attack. As the dog puts it, "It just don't add up!"

There are a couple interesting things. One is that I said the dog tries to figure things out. The other is the dog's comment. Both treat a situation as being something that can be analyzed numerically. Listening to the radio on the drive back to work this noon I heard someone use the line "It doesn't compute." without being at all a reference to actual, or even fictional, computing. This is seems an updated version of "It doesn't add up." I wonder, how common is the compute version now that computers are ubiquitous and is the add up version fading as people no longer do much addition themselves?