In the coverage of the Democratic primary, have you noticed the phrase “a complex mathematical formula” — as in the sentence “it looks like Hillary Clinton is going to win Texas, but the delegates are allocated by a complex mathematical formula . . . ?”

Let’s unpack this statement for a moment. A “formula” is an abstract or symbolic rule that you can apply to various situations. OK, so we know they are going to use a rule to allocate the delegates; they’re not just going to do it on the fly. So far, so good.

Next step: if you’re going to assign a number of delegates to one candidate and another number of delegates to another candidate, you’re using numbers, so yeah, the formula is probably going to be “mathematical.” You’re not going to use a “chemical formula,” for example, to allocate the delegates. At the risk of stating the obvious, there is nothing that is not a “rule involving numbers” that they could possibly use to assign the delegates.

So the only thing left is “complex” — in other words, the rule involving numbers is complicated. “Complex” doesn’t tell us what the content of the rule is — it just tells us a characteristic of that rule, a rule we still don’t know.

Incidentally, the “complex” rule was typically this: in a given congressional district you get the percentage of the delegates closest to the percentage of the votes you got in that district. So assume there’s four delegates. If you get 50 percent of the vote, you get two of the four; if you get 75 percent, you get three of the four; and you switch from getting two to getting three at the halfway point — 67.5 percent of the vote. Some congressional districts get more delegates than others because some have more Democrats or Democratic voters in them, and some states determine the number of delegates based on the country or state legislature district rather than the congressional district.

So the formula isn’t that “complex” at all. In fact, the Burnt Orange Report, a Texas politics blog, had primary delegate projections that were accurate to about three percent a week ahead of the contest, for example. They also put up a map of the districts and how many delegates were allocated to each so you could get a sense of how they arrived at these projections.

Meanwhile, the “best political team on TV” was projecting who would win the statewide popular vote in Texas a week later, after the voting was already over. It’s surreal. After reporting the irrelevant popular vote number, they explain that what they just said has something to do with the right number, but the relationship is “complex.” I don’t believe that CNN’s team of experts are literally unable to make sense of the process — more likely they think we’d rather listen to discredited have-beens like Ralph Reed argue over who has the “momentum.”

Things like baseballs have momentum. Elections have facts.

Perhaps it’s the untold story of the 2008 election that bloggers a few years out of college have consistently showed up the most important news outlets in America. But that wouldn’t be new.

Think about this: do you remember the subprime mortgage scandal — how “complex deals turned sour?” Do you have any idea what these “complex deals” were — or how “a flavor you perceive with the sides of your tongue” relates to “the process of either selling an asset on short notice or drumming up more money to set aside as the collateral for a loan whose credit rating just got downgraded?” Doesn’t that relationship seem worth reporting? Or to whom the billions of lost dollars belonged and where they went?

Or how about this one: Chinese “Blue Sky” air quality standards are 250 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter, and they try to get there 245 days a year, or about two thirds of the time. In contrast, the United States EPA standards are 150 micrograms per cubic meter, and they are not to be exceeded more than once a year. In other words, one in three days in Beijing the air is 70 percent more polluted than an American city is allowed to be one day per year. Remember the extensive New York Times piece on the topic? The 2,500-word article on pollution levels never once used the word “gram,” the unit which is used to measure pollution levels. That’s embarrassing.

There are a lot of things you can’t understand without numbers — how delegates are allocated, where the subprime mortgage money went or how Beijing’s air quality compares to international standards, for example. Email me if you’d like to help me do something about this. I’m in the very initial stages of starting a “Numbers in the News” project with a couple buddies.

Kai Stinchcombe still has a couple tricks up his sleeve. Email him at kstinch@stanford.edu.