Last August, a group of aliens Oregon State University students created a Firefox logo crop circle in a field near Salem, Oregon. The goal? Why, to have it appear on Google Maps, of course!
If you think that’s cool, rather than incredibly geeky, dorky and nerdy (yes, it qualifies as all three), then there’s a shirt for you.
Yesterday, in the men’s room at my office, I noticed a penny on the floor directly under one of the urinals. I should note that, for some reason best left unexplained, there’s always a small puddle of something on the floor under the urinals. (Apparently someone has chronic bad aim.)
There was no chance in hell I was going to pick that penny up! But it got me thinking, what is the smallest unit of currency I would pick up from that location, assuming it required me to touch it with my bare hands? I pondered for a minute and decided with confidence that a five dollar bill would be the minimum value for which I would subject myself to the sub-urinal horrors.
What about you?
Today is Pi Day (3.14… get it?) and in honor of such a momentous event, I want to share this link (courtesy of the StarTribune) to someone who only can be described as Carman‘s mathmatician brother, parodying Eminem with…
Enjoy.
I’m fascinated by this. Apparently these skeletons have been unearthed in Italy during excavation for a new construction project. There’s just something incredibly compelling about this photo.
This is an old story, but a coworker and I were just discussing “The Monty Hall Problem,” which comes down to the common scenario from the old game show “Let’s Make a Deal”: If you have three doors, with a car behind one of them, and dud prizes behind the other two, once you’ve made your selection and the host reveals a dud prize behind one of the other doors, does it make sense for you to switch doors or stick with the one you’ve picked?
The simple intuitive answer is that it makes no difference, now that there’s a 50/50 shot at opening the right door. But it seems that 2/3 of the time it’s better to switch! We pondered this for a while and I guessed that it may have something to do with the fact that the host knows which door the car is really behind.
Apparently that’s correct. (Since this link points to an ancient [in Internet time] web page that may or may not endure, although it’s made it this long, I’ll provide a summary here.)
This roulette wheel is the key. The inner circle is the door the car is behind, the middle circle is the door the contestant picks, and the outer circle is the door(s) Monty Hall can open after the contestant picks. The red spaces indicate that the contestant should switch, and the blue that they should not. 2/3 of the time it’s better to switch, because Monty Hall has basically been forced to reveal that the car is behind the door the contestant did not pick.
In other words, the contestant picks the right door the first time 1/3 of the time. This is pretty straightforward. That means that 2/3 of the time they did not pick the right door the first time, also straightforward. Therefore, since 2/3 of the time the car is not behind the door they picked, and Monty Hall will never open the door the car is behind, then 2/3 of the time the car is behind the door that neither the contestant nor Monty Hall picked, so the contestant doubles their chance of winning by switching.