The Gimcrack Miscellany

I have always been fascinated with counterintuitive puzzles. During my third year in quantitative analysis at IUPUI I was presented with the famous Monty Hall problem. It states:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Another way to say it in less words is:

In search of a new car, the player picks door 1. The game host then opens door 3 to reveal a goat and offers to let the player pick door 2 instead of door 1. Should the player switch?

Would you believe that you actually double your chances if you switch doors, even though the objects behind the doors haven’t changed? Counterintuitive indeed. You’re saying “no way, I’d have to be an idiot to believe that.”

I have never been able to explain this paradox to people without getting into a bunch of details and diagrams and examples and such, which has been pretty frustrating because your average “non-geek” person will just lose interest as soon as they see something shiny. (If detail is what you’re after, check out the all-knowing Wikipedia article on the Monty Hall problem.)

The point of this post is that I finally found a simple way of understanding this logic. Just increase the number of doors. If instead of choosing 1 out of 3 doors you chose 1 out of 100 doors with goats behind 99 of them, and the game host removed 98 doors with goats behind them leaving just your original door and one other door, switching would increase your chances from 1/100 to 99/100. This proves that switching really can increase your odds, even if nothing behind the doors is actually changed. It shows that the game host’s prior knowledge of the location of the prize plays a big part of the original odds.

If that rattled your brain, this will blow your mind:

If you were to fully develop the entire tree for all possible chess moves in a single chess game, the total number of board positions far exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

Oh, so you disagree with that? Just like you disagreed with the Monty Hall problem? I’ll explain it later because I think I’ve crossed the threshold of geekness for one blog post. I mean, who spends their Friday posting about probabilities and statistics, honestly?

Here’s some pictures of geeks so you can at least get some pleasure out of reading this insanely boring post.

I am no politician and I never will be. I have no idea what the political ramifications are of stating that the death penalty equals abortion. I am coming from a Christian conservative background, but being non-political means you can pretty much remove the “conservative” and say I’m simply coming from a Christian background. I know that being Christian implies a certain level of conservativeness, but I’m trying to remove any elements of politics here, if you can’t tell.

I came across this pro-death penalty quote on prodeathpenalty.com (go figure):

“If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call.”

John McAdams - Marquette University/Department of Political Science, on deterrence

Well, John, I don’t know who you are (well actually I guess I do since it says next to your name), but I don’t agree with you at all. This, to me, IS a tough call, and the amount of disagreement on the subject is proof. Instead of convincing people that capital punishment is right or wrong, I’m going to compare it with another subject that is likely opposed by a lot of people in favor the death penalty: abortion.

Let’s take both subjects to the extreme, because if you look at something in the most extreme example and make a statement about it, you can apply your findings to all the other examples under the umbrella of the subject at hand.

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I just received a mass email containing a message that reminded me of the way Jerry McGuire wrote that memo, or mission statement, that totally went against the grain and was a huge risk on his part… and got him fired. The email is apparently a message written by Jay Leno himself, although I highly disbelieve this. It doesn’t matter though, because it truly is one of the best things I’ve read in a while.

I once personally offended someone by lashing out at them publicly because they sent me a mass email that was completely bullshit and only existed to perpetuate itself. That’s spam, and I don’t want it cluttering up my business email in-box. I’m sorry for hurting this person’s feelings and it’s something I won’t do again, but the point is that I don’t want to have to filter through this crap in addition to the crap that is sent from automated email spamming programs.

I must say that I was particularly impressed with the message I received and I don’t care who wrote it. I’m glad to have received it, and it’s really the first and only time I’ve ever received a mass email that I’ve enjoyed. It’s posted after the jump for your reading pleasure. And remember, I don’t really believe that Jay Leno had anything to do with it, but that doesn’t matter. In fact, I’ll hit up Snopes and check, be right back… yep I was right, however the quote in the last paragraph WAS Jay Leno’s. Go figure.

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Not five minutes after I published this post in which I go into some detail about amusement park accidents, a girl’s feet were both severed above the ankle by the Superman Tower of Power (formerly known as The Hellivator) at Kentucky Kingdom. These kinds of things do not happen very often. To have something like this happen at one of the closest amusement parks in proximity to me literally five minutes after I published my post is a little scary.

A couple days ago I was discussing this accident with someone who replied, “yeah, but she’ll be rich for the rest of her life.” True, she will be rich, but she will have no legs! If someone asked you if you would trade both of your legs at the age of 13 for a couple million bucks, what would you do? Especially if it involved having them ripped off by a thrill ride whose purpose was already to scare the living hellivator out of you. You would say no. Shut up, yes you wou-yes you-shut up dude-shut-yes you would.

What I’m really upset about is that they closed all similar rides at other amusement parks, including one of my personal favorites (and one I’m due to be riding in exactly a week from today), the Drop Zone at King’s Island. According to this article the Drop Zone is a much bigger and faster ride:

The Superman ride takes passengers up 177 feet and then drops them nearly 154 feet at 54 mph before stopping. Drop Zone takes riders up 264 feet and drops them at 67 mph.

I can attest to that, as I’ve been on the Drop Zone many times and it never EVER lets me down.

You know what this reminds me of? I had a dream about 2 747s crashing into government buildings in Washingdon D.C. the night before September 11th. When I was awakened by my mom to find out about the actual terrorist attacks, I remember telling her that I was just having a dream about that. No, there weren’t any TVs or radios on anywhere near me while I was sleeping, and yes, I was actually having the dreams before it happened. What does that mean? Do my sick fantasies actually cause real-life events? If so, I will cease and desist immediately.

»Article about the other rides closing
»News clip about the accident

Tom Cruise is making a new movie, and as much as I hate to admit, it sounds awesome. It’s about Col. Claus von Stauffenberg who was involved with a World War II era plot to kill Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime. It’s called Valkyrie, it’s directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects and X-Men), and it will star Tom Cruise.

The only problem is he wants to film it in Berlin, and the Germans don’t want a Scientologist to portray someone as honorable as Col. Stauffenberg, so they aren’t letting him shoot the picture there. I don’t know how I feel about this. Part of me thinks it’s petty for a government to ban filming of a movie that tells this story, but part of me is glad that they are standing up for what they believe in.

I would be surprised if America pulled something like this, and frankly I would be disappointed. We’re all about tolerance and freedom of religion here, and apparently Germany is not. Still, I think I need to dig deeper to see why they are opposed to the movie, especially since Tom Cruise has gone insane recently. But dang does he make awesome movies.

Other interesting things I found out: Eddie Izzard is to star in this movie (last time I saw him he was a transvestite stand-up British comedian), Jenna Elfman is the daughter-in-law of Danny Elfman’s brother (how’d I miss that?), and Tom is even shorter than I thought, poor guy.

Read the whole article here.