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Thursday, September 19, 2013
I Am Not a Country Fan
Not a country hater either, but holy crap:
Her voice goes past 11. Way past.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Yahtzee Thoughts
I played a couple games of Yahtzee with family members during a recent vacation, and realized that many (perhaps most) people play the game without realizing the correct odds on certain rolls.
For example, one of the objects in the game is to roll the long straight--either 2 to 6 or 1 to 5. Suppose that you roll four of the required numbers on your first throw, say 1,2,3,4. You have one die left, but two rolls. What are the odds that you will roll the five? Obviously on the next roll it's 1 in 6 and the same applies for the final roll, so your odds are 2 in 6 or 1 in 3, right?
Nope. Sometimes it helps to look at the odds against something happening. In this case, the odds that you don't roll the 5 are 5/6 on each roll. If we multiply those two together, we can see that the odds that you won't roll the 5 are 25/36. Which means that the odds that you will roll the five are only 11/36, or slightly less than 1/3.
This is obviously counter-intuitive, so let's list all the possible rolls:
1 1
1 2
1 3
1 4
1 5
1 6
2 1
2 2
2 3
2 4
2 5
2 6
3 1
3 2
3 3
3 4
3 5
3 6
4 1
4 2
4 3
4 4
4 5
4 6
5 1
5 2
5 3
5 4
5 5
5 6
6 1
6 2
6 3
6 4
6 5
6 6
If you count them up, there are 11 out of rolls with at least a 5, although there are 12 5s overall. The key is that 5,5 roll; that second five is as useful as nipples on men.
There are similar mistakes in statistics on other possible rolls. For example, both my sister and I were exasperated at the number of times we'd roll three of a number, then fail to get the fourth (or fifth) of that number on the two succeeding chances. Again, it seems like the odds are 2/6 twice, or 4/6 (about 67%).
But in fact, they aren't that good. We've already seen that the odds of rolling against rolling any specific number with two dice are 25/36, so all we have to do to find out the odds against it with two rolls are to square that number. It comes out to 625/1296, so the odds of getting that fourth one are 671/1296, which is about 52%.
Suppose you are at the very end and you need to roll three or more of some particular number in order to get your bonus. What are the odds that you will do just that? Unlike in the above cases I am not able to calculate the odds directly, so I set up a spreadsheet where I generated five random numbers. If any of the numbers was a 6, I told the spreadsheet to leave it alone, but otherwise to reroll. Once again I checked for 6s and rerolled any that weren't. Overall I was a little surprised. The percentage of three 6s or better bounced around a bit, but generally was around 35.5%. The percentage of four 6s or better was around 10.4%. And the percentage of Yahtzees (five 6s) was only about 1.3%.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Tip your hat to an unnamed CBS reporter, who wins the prize for the most objective news report. Notice the extreme use of passive voice, even in the headline.
Violence continues in France over Islamic veil ban
It's just violence and it's continuing. No hint as to who's being violent. To further confuse things, they include a picture of an Islamic woman, with this caption:
Rabia, 17, a veiled woman victim of agression (sic) in the street on May 20,
speaks during a press conference on June 22, 2013 in Argenteuil, Paris
suburb.
A veiled woman was attacked? Sounds like the jack-booted anti-veil forces are out in great numbers! But again, we get the very noticeable passive voice:
Some 20 cars have been torched and four people detained in a second
night of violence in suburbs west of Paris, a result of tensions linked
to authorities' handling of France's ban on Muslim face veils.
This continues throughout the piece; if you are not paying close attention you might even think that it's the narrow-minded anti-Islamic crowd responsible:
The interior minister urged calm and dialogue, insisting on both the
need for public order and respect for France's Muslims. The incident in
the town of Trappes on Friday night reflected sporadic tensions between
police upholding France's strict policies of secularism and those who
accuse authorities of discriminating against France's No. 2 religion.
The first part is an obvious false dilemma. How about if the folks in favor of the veil ban are also in favor of public order and respect? But the "people" who are not are, say, Muslims, opposing the veil ban?
Time for some more passive voice:
A few garbage dumpsters in the area were torched and a bus shelter
shattered in the Trappes unrest. Spent tear gas capsules lay on the road
Saturday near the police station at the center of the violence.
No hint as to who might have torched those dumpsters or shattered the bus shelter. It just happened, mkay? And the tear gas capsules are easily the blame of the local constabulary.
A 14-year-old boy suffered a serious eye injury in the violence, from a
projectile of unknown provenance, Prosecutor Vincent Lesclous told
reporters. Four police officers were injured and six people were
detained in the violence, said an official with the regional police
administration.
It goes on and on.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
A 45-Year-Old Error Lives On
Heheh. A friend of mine is a big fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, and I gave him my copy of a recent Baseball Digest with a nice article on the late Stan Musial, one of the greatest baseball players of all time and an even better person. I noted how sick it was that the Cardinals seemed able to spit out 2.50 ERA pitchers at will. He mentioned that there was a recent article in Sports Illustrated about "The Cardinal Way" and dropped it off later in the afternoon.
It's a very good article, and I highly recommend it. But what I found amusing is that the cover (showing current Cards' stars like Adam Wainwright) was based on a pose for a 1968 cover featuring then-Redbirds like Roger Maris, Tim McCarver and Bob Gibson. Unfortunately for SI and St. Louis, the cover bore the banner "World Champion St. Louis Cardinals" and was dated October 7, 1968. While technically true (the Cardinals had won the 1967 World Series), the cover turned out to be the Dewey Defeats Truman of SI covers, as the Detroit Tigers rallied from a 3-1 series deficit to win the WS on October 10, 1968.
It was a very improbable comeback; the Cards had already beaten Detroit's ace, Denny McClain, twice in the series, and would have the seemingly unbeatable Bob Gibson (with his amazing 1.12 ERA that year) on the mound for the finale.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Not With A Bang or a Whimper, But A Misplaced Semi-Colon...
Like many, I have recently replaced books with electronic reading; my current preference is for a Nook. I love the convenience, the ability to take several books with me in one package, the way I can puff up the font in the evening to adjust for my declining eyesight.
What do I hate? The appalling number of errors in the transcriptions. Granted, having grown up in the era of most of these books, I can quickly correct the mistakes; dear is actually clear (or vice-versa); tle is probably the, and le is probably he.
Consider, for example, Norman Mailer's well-known article for Dissent, The White Negro. I'm certainly no fan of Mailer, but his writing deserves better than this hash at the Dissent website.
Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the hipster. The hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformists by lying tow …
Lying tow? Yep, in the second sentence of a major work by a major writer, there's an obvious error, one that I have no doubt did not appear in the original. But as we shall see, this is only tle tip of the iceberg:
it is tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times, lie does not try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested
These first two bits are from the opening paragraph, and they are not by Mailer himself, but his quote from a Harper's article by Caroline Bird. But the errors are all modern, as is evident from further quotes in the article:
For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of super-states founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it wits nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?
Bolding added for emphasis.
The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, lob and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible.
Bolding added for emphasis.
It just goes on and on. It's tempting to think that the obvious mistakes will be fixed, but the language changes. Maybe someone will point out that Arthur Ashe couldn't lob like white tennis players.
And I am not confident that the rest of the Western canon is being faithfully reproduced electronically. Let's face it, if the editors at Dissent can't fix some obvious bloopers, why should we think that the editors at Random House, who are probably seeing their future disappear anyway, are going to be more careful?
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Say What?
My old blog-buddy Rick Moran checks in with a post about Dr Benjamin Carson's rather odd talk on Sean Hannity's TV show:
Dr. Ben Carson is an urbane, sophisticated, very intelligent man, as
he has demonstrated in his public appearances over the last few months.
So what possessed him to say this to Sean Hannity on Fox the other night?
Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they
gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it
doesn’t matter what they are. They don’t get to change the definition.
I don't know why he brought NAMBLA or dog-fetishists into the conversation; it would be much easier (and less cringe-worthy) to bring up polygamists. Of course, his antiquated notion that marriage is between a man and a woman was mainstream Democrat only a few years ago.
But Rick himself makes an oddball aside:
It should be noted that if he believes that gays should have “all the
rights anyone else has,” then he should be supporting gay marriage.
Obviously, it was an inartful way to say he doesn’t think gays should be
discriminated against — a position at odds with most of the Republican
base who don’t think gays should be protected under affirmative action
law.
I don't think gays should be discriminated against, but I am not sure that the government should create laws banning such discrimination (other than, say, discrimination by the government). And I for damn sure don't think gays should be "protected" under affirmative action. Affirmative action is supposedly intended to right past wrongs, but, and this is the key, it's supposed to right past wrongs against one's ancestors. But gays (mostly) don't have gay ancestors; by definition almost all have been born to heterosexual couples.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
I'm Completely Baffled, Too!
The New York Times finds a conundrum in the city's elite public schools:
At all eight of the schools that admit students based on an eighth-grade
test, boys outnumber girls, sometimes emphatically.
And thus, the whole focus of the article becomes why that particular result occurred. But note that no question is raised about some other results:
In the United States, girls have outshined boys in high school for
years, amassing more A’s, earning more diplomas and gliding more readily
into college, where they rack up more degrees — whether at the
bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral levels.
That result is just accepted as normal and natural. The idea that boys might do better on standardized tests, or more specifically, the very top rung of boys might do better than the very top rung of girls on those tests, hey, we gotta find an explanation.
“It is very suspect that you don’t have as many girls as boys in New York City’s specialized schools,” said Janet S. Hyde,
a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin who has published
research on girls’ performance in math and science from elementary
school through college. Individual girls might be losing opportunities,
she said, “but it is also bad for society as a whole because in a global
economy we need to identify the best scientists and mathematicians.”
Some might say that's the whole point of standardized tests. The article notes:
This year, of those who took the Specialized High School Admissions
Test, 51 percent were girls. But only 45 percent of those offered seats
in the schools were girls.
Ah, but then where do you get imbalances like those noted here:
Boys make up nearly 60 percent of the largest and most renowned schools, Stuyvesant, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, and as much as 67 percent at the High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, according to city statistics.
I suspect strongly that a higher percentage of boys accept the seats, a fact that is hinted at here:
“I feel like, all the other schools, they mainly specialize in math and
science, and, I don’t know, that doesn’t sound appealing to me,” said
Ritika Modi, 16, a junior. She said she did not even apply to any
specialized schools. Also, as a resident of Queens Village, she said,
her parents “weren’t O.K.” with her commuting as far as Brooklyn or the
Bronx, an issue several other girls noted.
As for the differences in passing rates on the specialized exam, it is really not all that hard to figure out. Boys have a larger standard deviation in their mental abilities; more men are geniuses and more men are retarded than women. Hence there will be more boys in the gifted class and more in the special ed class.
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
Monk Season 4
Some terrific episodes here, although I do note that the comedy aspect has been the focus as compared to the detective aspect. For example, in the Mr Monk Goes To A Wedding episode, Randy Disher is run down by a speeding car while escorting Natalie to her brother's wedding. Despite severe injuries including a broken arm and broken leg, he is still staying at the hotel where the wedding is taking place.
Other bits are obviously anachronistic. In the Mr Monk and Mrs Monk episode, the apparent Mrs Monk rips the film out of Natalie's camera. In 2005? The scene is especially obvious because in the prior episode (Mr Monk Gets Drunk), a digital photograph is erased the modern way, by deleting it from the camera's flash memory.
And in the otherwise charming Mr Monk and Little Monk episode, there are two gaping flaws. One, the girl from Monk's past whom he rescued from being accused of theft, remembers him instead (according to her husband) as never having taken gym class. First, if somebody helped you out in eighth grade by finding out who really stole the money, wouldn't you remember that as the most significant thing about that person? And second, in my school years, gym was segregated by gender, so the girls would have no clue what I did. I don't have a clue what the girls did in that class either.
But aside from these flaws, the Fourth Season is terrific and (as I said at the beginning) very funny.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Monk
I've been watching the DVDs of this series (the only way to watch television) the last couple of weeks, and find them terrific. The show features Tony Shahloub as Adrian Monk, a brilliant detective and mental basket case. Monk is a caricature of an obsessive-compulsive type.
The stories generally take the form of a howdunnit rather than a whodunnit. Monk frequently identifies the murderer rather early in the show ("He's the guy!") and the remainder of the show is him trying to figure out how the killer's apparently airtight alibi is actually phony.
Shahloub's acting is sheer genius; he is a master of the physical comedy that his character requires. And the rest of the cast plays off each other well. Ted Levine is Captain Stottlemeyer, a chief of detectives who hires Monk on a consulting basis. He has an exasperated air with Monk's obsessions and the goofy suppositions of his Lieutenant, Randy Disher. Disher, played by Jason Grey-Stanford in turn tries to hit on Monk's assistant (and former nurse) Sharona Fleming (Bitty Schram). I have just now gotten to the part of the series (third season) where Sharona leaves for good and is replaced by Natalie Teeger (Traylor Howard), so it's hard to say yet whether that chemistry will last.
About the only negative I can find in the series is that it doesn't have a very good sense of place. The show is set in San Francisco, but aside from a few establishing shots of the Transamerica Pyramid and the occasional cable car, you don't get the feeling that much of the show really happens in the City by the Bay. There's no fog, no cold, no wind. In an early episode, it is remarked that the weather that day was 95 degrees, which would be an exceedingly rare event in San Francisco. I lived there for three years and never once needed air conditioning.
And, notable in probably the gayest town in America, there are almost no apparent homosexual characters, either recurring or single episode. In one show only, a character is referred to as "playing for the other team," which causes Monk some confusion until Sharona explains that, "He's... you know."
Thursday, January 10, 2013
You Gotta Love This
Dave Weigel inadvertently reveals something in an article intended to quell concerns about Biden's claim that Obama will handle gun control via an executive order. One of the suggestions by gun control advocates:
Directing the DOJ to prosecute more "prohibited purchasers"
when they attempt to buy guns. In 2009, the FBI referred 71,000 cases
of thse buyers, mostly felons. U.S. attorneys prosecuted only 77 cases.
Yep, that's right. When convicted felons, the one group of people who everyone agrees shouldn't have guns, attempted to purchase a gun, about 1 in a thousand was actually prosecuted for that crime.
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Poverty Does Cause Terrorism
Just not the kind of poverty that liberals spend their time talking about. Instead it's the poverty of values that liberals fail to inculcate in their children, because they are so afraid of making any kind of judgment.
The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a
Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for
allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their
Greenwich Village apartment.
It is often forgotten that Bill Ayers was the son of the CEO of Commonwealth Edison, Bernadine Dohrn grew up in an upper-middle class suburb, and Mohamed Atta was the son of a doctor. My guess is that all their parents were liberal in their approach to child-rearing, just as I presume the same applies to the privileged daughter and her boyfriend in the linked story.
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