It's blowing my mind!

I just read a fascinating book called "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow. It's about randomness and chance and how our brains are not wired correctly to comprehend chance. It was on the "new book" shelf at the library and I thought, "It might be boring, but I'll give it a try."

It was not boring. I learned a lot, and really had my eyes opened to my lack of understanding. One example he cited has really stuck with me. It's blowing my mind!

It's called the "let's make a deal" problem. Bear with me: I realize that this might be a bit dry, but I'll try to keep it interesting.

Monty Hall had a game show called Let's Make a Deal. One of the games involved him showing three doors, or curtains, or boxes. Behind one of the doors was a fabulous prize! Like a moped, or a vacation for 2 to Des Moines, Iowa, or something. The other two doors hid goats, or something of equal un-value.

Let's pretend that you are the contestant. You must pick one of the three doors. You have a 1 in 3 chance of winning. So you pick one.

Monte, who knows what's behind all the doors, opens one of the two doors you didn't pick, and he always picks one that is an anti-prize; a goat door. So now there are only two doors remaining. You are given a choice: you may either stick with your original choice of door, or switch to the other unopened door.

Well, there are only two doors left, so its a 1 in 2 chance of winning, right? So either door has an equal chance of sending you and a friend on that all expense paid trip to Iowa.




I'd like you to stop reading for a moment and think about this. Is there any advantage to switching to the other door? Close your eyes and hum some classical music so you'll be smarter. When you're sure come back.

I could not think of any reason to switch. I racked my brain, but it always came back to a 50/50 chance. However, during the run of the show, and in computer simulations it can be shown that you're twice as likely to win if you switch to the other door.

No way! Two doors, one prize. It has to be 50%.

This is what blows my mind.

It comes down to breaking the random chance with an all-knowing observer. OK, you started with a 33.3% chance of being right, and a 66.7% chance of being wrong. The observer, who knows what is behind all the doors, opens one of the bad doors. He doesn't select a random door, he purposefully selects one of the two bad doors.

What this means is that you still have a 33.3% chance that you picked the wrong door, and a 66.7% chance that one of the other two doors is right. You're not going to pick the door that Monte showed you, because you now know it's wrong. In effect, the other door has absorbed all of the % chance of both doors. If you switch to the other door, you now have a 66.7% chance of having the right door.

It really works that way, here's a link to a page where you can try it. Just make sure you try each case enough times to be valid. (no, once is not enough. Try 30 or 40)

Does that hurt your brain? I can explain it, but do I truly understand it?

Read More......

Rush hour fun

My new job is only close to my house in the same way that diet soda tastes close to regular soda. Not close at all. Yes, I'm back commuting. It's not all bad. I have time to listen to my podcasts and some tunes and enjoy the top down on my sweet Wrangler. I've had a (surprisingly) pretty good attitude about it.

I've been enjoying open-air driving a lot. Even when it's pretty hot out, it's worth it to let the air run her fingers through my hair (just don't tell Allie!) :)

I discovered one downside to being exposed to the air last week on my way to work.

My drive is mostly on the freeway, and about half of it is stop-and-go. During the stop-and-go time, there's nothing really you can do but breathe deeply and not think about it.

Well, last week I was sitting there breathing deeply, when something unpleasant entered my personal space. A giant semi ended up next to me and boy did it stink! The trailer had an open top and it was filled to overflowing with rank garbage. The smell quickly became overpowering. My honey nut cheerios were in serious danger of coming up.

Normally in this sort of scenario, I'd just close the windows and put the AC on recirc, but that won't work in the Wrangler! We stop-and-goed together for 5 or 6 minutes until his lane slowly pulled ahead of me. I could still smell it, but I wasn't gagging anymore.

Why would you drive a semi full of trash on the freeway during rush hour anyway? Couldn't the garbage wait an hour? By leaving later and missing all the delays, you could probably get your rush trash delivery to the dump at almost the same time!

Read More......

Stupid dog

As I've written about before, we are trying again with a new dog. Why? I dunno. I guess we're gluttons for punishment. Our dog, Max, is the closest thing I've seen to the perfect pet for us. He mostly sleeps and lays around. Every now and then, though, his dog-ish nature comes out and look what happens!

Allie has started horseback riding lessons. I was all for it, but I wondered why you need lessons. I mean, you just sit on the horse and he carries you around, right? Wrong. Apparently it takes quite a bit of skill. Anyway, I'm trying to get her to post about it, so I won't comment on it too much here.

Suffice it to say, she is having a blast. We had to go out and buy her some cowgirl boots. They have all sort of fancy ones now, and we found some comfortable ones that were oh so cute!

Last week, Allie went to her lesson and then had to rush home, change, and get to work. She threw her boots down and rushed off.

She had a stressful day at work(boy, I wish I could blog about that!) Then she got home and found this! Not good. Why did he do this? He'll barely eat dog treats. He won't chew on chew toys. He barely plays at all. Why did he decide to ingest a boot? Your guess is as good as mine. My guess is that it smelled of horse, and that set something off in his microscopic dog brain.

The funnest part was finding pieces of green boot in his smelly dog piles all week long.

Read More......

The Financial Crisis

It has been all over the news: The Financial Crisis. There are lots of news stories covering small pieces of the story. What I haven't seen is any good coverage of the whole big story. This is the best article I've found that really explains the history of what happened, why the bailout plan might work, and what might happen next. It's a good read, but it's scary stuff.

Here's the scariest part:

Note that the outstanding overhang of credit default swaps alone is estimated to be between $45 and $60 trillion – three to four times the size of our annual gross domestic product. The requested $700 billion, although the single biggest appropriation request in U.S. history, was miniscule when compared with the toxic waste problem as a whole. Mr. Paulson’s proposed solution was to cost just 1% of the size of the problem and was aimed only at a small part of that problem. (It is unnerving to realize that the U.S. government – the “beast” we have been starving for so long – may now lack the borrowing capacity to solve the problem as a whole. We need to get our financial house in order.)

Read More......