Thursday, May 20, 2004
This bloke's list of things he and his girlfriend have argued about is hilarious. Real people couldn't possibly be like that, oh no...
Leila and I have been arguing for the past few days over 'the Monty Hall problem'. It's a statistical paradox that plenty of otherwise very intelligent people can't seem to grasp. Basically it runs as follows. There are 3 doors, behind two of which are goats, and behind one is a car. The contestant picks the door behind which he or she thinks is the car (some people might, of course, prefer the goat, but we have to ignore that possibility). Monty Hall then opens one of the other doors, revealing a goat, and the contestant is given the opportunity to change his or her mind, and pick the other door. The question is: should one always stick to the original choice, should one always change, or does it make no difference? Most people intuitively think 'Ah. So the choice is between 2 doors, so it must be 50:50, so it doesn't really make any difference whether I stick or change.' This is not true, however. At the outset, one's chance of picking the car is 1 in 3. We know that there's always going to be a spare goat, so Monty can always reveal a goat, so seeing a goat behind one of the other doors does not change the original probability of having picked the car. If the probability of the car being behind the door originally picked is 1 in 3, then the probability of it's being behind the one remaining door is 2 in 3. Weird isn't it?! One should always change to the other door, because the likelihood of winning the car is doubled. I started running some tests by hand (using dice to simulate the position of the car and the contestant's choice), but then I discovered this site, where someone ran a software simulation a billion times and confirmed the 1 in 3 to 2 in 3 ratio. There's also quite a good explanation of the problem here.
City of Heroes, a new PC game sounds fun, though I'm useless at games requiring quick reactions, and am, in any case, way too obsessed with the magnificent Crusader Kings to change game just yet.
On Monday night we had a little visitor. At first we thought it was just a little twig stuck to a bath towel, but when I tried to remove it, I realised it was actually a caterpillar. Its camouflage was brilliant—it had the right markings to be a twig, and could hold itself completely stiff and straight. A caterpillar identification book from the UL revealed that it was certainly one of the Geometridae family, and most likely a Willow Beauty. Unfortunately that picture doesn't show the characteristic, standing-out-straight behaviour of the family. We released it yesterday onto an ivy bush in the back garden.
What else...? In the end I didn't buy a full football strip, but settled for boots (difficult because of my wide, pod-like feet) and shorts. Will have to miss this week's game, to give my hip a chance to recover.
Oh, and I've updated Mandrake 9.2 to Mandrake 10. Was slightly stymied by the fact that the option to create a boot floppy during setup wouldn't work on a DOS-formatted floppy. I know that's sort of obvious, but you'd expect that it'd be capable of reformatting and then writing, wouldn't you?! So I ended up with the same situation that I had last time, where I had a working installation but no way of booting into it... In the end I managed to create a boot floppy from the command line in the Recovery interface offered after booting the installation CD. Bit of a palaver, though.
Any suggestions for 8 Across in this crossword?
Leila and I have been arguing for the past few days over 'the Monty Hall problem'. It's a statistical paradox that plenty of otherwise very intelligent people can't seem to grasp. Basically it runs as follows. There are 3 doors, behind two of which are goats, and behind one is a car. The contestant picks the door behind which he or she thinks is the car (some people might, of course, prefer the goat, but we have to ignore that possibility). Monty Hall then opens one of the other doors, revealing a goat, and the contestant is given the opportunity to change his or her mind, and pick the other door. The question is: should one always stick to the original choice, should one always change, or does it make no difference? Most people intuitively think 'Ah. So the choice is between 2 doors, so it must be 50:50, so it doesn't really make any difference whether I stick or change.' This is not true, however. At the outset, one's chance of picking the car is 1 in 3. We know that there's always going to be a spare goat, so Monty can always reveal a goat, so seeing a goat behind one of the other doors does not change the original probability of having picked the car. If the probability of the car being behind the door originally picked is 1 in 3, then the probability of it's being behind the one remaining door is 2 in 3. Weird isn't it?! One should always change to the other door, because the likelihood of winning the car is doubled. I started running some tests by hand (using dice to simulate the position of the car and the contestant's choice), but then I discovered this site, where someone ran a software simulation a billion times and confirmed the 1 in 3 to 2 in 3 ratio. There's also quite a good explanation of the problem here.
City of Heroes, a new PC game sounds fun, though I'm useless at games requiring quick reactions, and am, in any case, way too obsessed with the magnificent Crusader Kings to change game just yet.
On Monday night we had a little visitor. At first we thought it was just a little twig stuck to a bath towel, but when I tried to remove it, I realised it was actually a caterpillar. Its camouflage was brilliant—it had the right markings to be a twig, and could hold itself completely stiff and straight. A caterpillar identification book from the UL revealed that it was certainly one of the Geometridae family, and most likely a Willow Beauty. Unfortunately that picture doesn't show the characteristic, standing-out-straight behaviour of the family. We released it yesterday onto an ivy bush in the back garden.
What else...? In the end I didn't buy a full football strip, but settled for boots (difficult because of my wide, pod-like feet) and shorts. Will have to miss this week's game, to give my hip a chance to recover.
Oh, and I've updated Mandrake 9.2 to Mandrake 10. Was slightly stymied by the fact that the option to create a boot floppy during setup wouldn't work on a DOS-formatted floppy. I know that's sort of obvious, but you'd expect that it'd be capable of reformatting and then writing, wouldn't you?! So I ended up with the same situation that I had last time, where I had a working installation but no way of booting into it... In the end I managed to create a boot floppy from the command line in the Recovery interface offered after booting the installation CD. Bit of a palaver, though.
Any suggestions for 8 Across in this crossword?
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Here's some stuff that caught my attention today:
Right. Off for my weekly kickabout on Parker's Piece. I really should get round to getting some proper football kit (I'm thinking Celtic for the strip
).
- 'Poacher turned gamekeeper' HIV. Ah. Just think—if only I'd followed my dreams and become a geneticist... I'm not one of those people who foam out the mouth and wave crucifixes around as soon as the word genetics is mentioned, but I am a little concerned at the notion of engineering viruses for release into the wild.
- XP Service Pack 2. Finally a Microsoft pop-up blocker...
- UFOs seen by Mexican airforce pilots. Depending on your mindset, either alien spacecraft, some natural terrestrial phenomenon, top-secret US aircraft, or a red-herring fed to the Mexican public by their government to cover up some conspiracy or other.
- Cicadas are about to attack and eat the eastern US.
Right. Off for my weekly kickabout on Parker's Piece. I really should get round to getting some proper football kit (I'm thinking Celtic for the strip
).Wednesday, May 12, 2004
I feel a bit stupid. (OK, OK, so this isn't all that uncommon an occurrence.) I'd noticed that there were layout problems with this blog in Safari (the sidebar was appearing under the main column). The problems developed in the last few days, so I attributed them to either the recent changes in the blogger service, or to the recent security update to Safari. I even wrote to blogger's help service, but they replied, saying that there was probably something wrong with my css. But I couldn't for the life of me see anything wrong with the css (apart from it being horribly messy as a result of hacking someone else's template). I whittled the problem down to it being something to do with the posts themselves. It was at this point that I noticed something odd: the 25th April post and all posts below it were indented. 'Hmm', I thought, 'I'd better take a look at the 1st May post.' It was then that I noticed I'd failed to close my bullet point list with the end ul tag... Arse.
Two morals to that, I think:
Two morals to that, I think:
- Don't assume that it's someone else's fault
- Always check your html
Sunday, May 09, 2004
In the end I started all over again. For some reason the patch had changed the surname for the Gwent dynasty to 'de Forz', but that's fine by me (I thought 'of Gwent' sounded a bit unrealistic anyway). Just spent pretty much a whole weekend playing, and I've reached March 1122! Jean de Forz, the first count got things up and running very nicely, managing to manœuvre his 4 sons into inheritance positions (trick is to marry them off to girls without legitimate brothers—if the inheritance laws are right, and they have sons, then they get the lot when daddy dies). Stunningest of all was marrying his firstborn son, Asclettin, to the Duke of Norfolk's oldest daughter. So, without any military intervention, the de Forz dynasty now directly controls the Duchy of Norfolk, and the Counties of Gwent, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln, Moray, Lusignan, somewhere else in France beginning with 'Th...', and Bern. Came close to getting Hamburg too, but the relevant 'member' of the dynasty refused to perform, as it were (can't really blame him—she looked like the proverbial bulldog with a damp nettle).
Saturday, May 01, 2004
Feeling very emotional at the moment. Dido's fault—singing along to emotional songs always gets to me, silly old bugger that I am. Nobody else like my voice, but I do, so there!
All the hardware stuff seems to have gone fine with my dad's computer. I say 'seems', because I haven't actually plugged it in yet, but I've no reason to doubt that it'll be fine. So I'll begin the software installation this weekend.
A new patch has just come out for CK, which is excellent news in one respect (fixes a lot of bugs and flaws), but not so good in that my current saved game files might not be compatible—if so, I'll have to start all over again in 1066... But CK is, as Mr Schmidt said, the best game ever!
Links for your delectation:
All the hardware stuff seems to have gone fine with my dad's computer. I say 'seems', because I haven't actually plugged it in yet, but I've no reason to doubt that it'll be fine. So I'll begin the software installation this weekend.
A new patch has just come out for CK, which is excellent news in one respect (fixes a lot of bugs and flaws), but not so good in that my current saved game files might not be compatible—if so, I'll have to start all over again in 1066... But CK is, as Mr Schmidt said, the best game ever!
Links for your delectation:
- The NETI@home project to gather data on network traffic from individual volunteers' computers all over the Net. If there's a good takeup it could improve the Net for everyone. Can't decide whether to give over my computer's downtime to this, as at the moment it's helping the University of Oxford to find the cure for cancer
- Apparently Green Tea is good for cleaning hard disks (just think what it does to your innards!)
- This speculation on a future 'Mediæval America' is quite amusing
