I just read this report published in the Hindustan Times which claims that “it is harder for a three-year-old to get into the nursery sections of some leading Delhi schools than for undergraduates to gain admission into one of the 13 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Harvard University, Yale University, Oxford University and Cambridge University.”

This astounding revelation follows from the fact that only one for every forty-six applicants were admitted, whereas “one of every 45 candidates made the cut last year [at the IIT-JEE].” I realized I had been believing in the myth all along that reporters are brain-dead. I now know that some of them actually possess anti-brains. Here is a conclusion of my own: It is harder for an American to order pizza at a Domino's Pizza in a neighboring state (because they won't deliver) than to land on the moon. The media loves to whore around with inane stats.

Apparently, when publishing costs are low, angry rejectees at a nursery get to write newspaper stories about how tough it is to get in.

Ashok | 2/10/2009 05:46:00 PM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 1 Blogspot comments |

The Times of India has an article today entitled Nearly half of Britons can't use the apostrophe properly: Survey. Here is the first paragraph.

LONDON: The apostrophe has emerged as the punctuation mark, which causes most problems for Britons, according to a new survey.

That is no reason to ignore comma-placement rules.

Ashok | 11/11/2008 04:22:00 AM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 0 Blogspot comments |

Director: Steven Spielberg; Writers: Philip K. Dick, Scott Frank, Jon Cohen; Cast: Tom Cruise, Max von Sydow, Steve Harris, Neal McDonough, et al.

I don't like sci-fi and fantasy stuff, and this film doesn't make me change my mind. If anything, it reinforces my view that, though people hail a lot of this as thought-provoking and realistic, it is basically illogical gibberish.

My general objection to fantasy can be neatly expressed using this analogy. Suppose you were watching a chess game live between two great players. You too are thinking along with them and are trying to guess what move each player will make. Assuming you're a competent player yourself, you may correctly guess some moves and be proved wrong on some. You will probably realize only a few moves later why the great player played differently from what you forecast.

After a while, one player forces a fork using his knight, checking the king and threatening the queen. The player about to lose his queen seems very calm—surely he has a brilliant counter coming. And then you see what it is. He moves his queen two steps along a rank and then one along a file to capture the opposing knight, smiling triumphantly. The player to lose his knight is stunned; he looks everywhere is despair, but he realizes he is done for.

You, of course, are crushed. You never knew such a thing was legal. They were not playing chess at all. You leave the table in disgust. Yet, you never quit in disgust when a fantasy novel or movie does this to you.

Minority Report is set in the distant future (2054), where there is a department of precrime. Three precognitives, or precogs in short, who are some sort of aberrant human beings, fuel the whole enterprise. They can foresee the future with deadly precision (supposedly), which talent can be harnessed for the prevention of crime. When Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), who's a representative of the attorney general is at the department to learn more about precrime, we learn about it along with him:

Witwer: ‘Someone intends to kill his boss or his wife, but they never go through with it. How do the pre-cogs tell the difference?’

Anderton: ‘Precogs don't see what you intend to do, only what you will do.’

Witwer: ‘Then why can't they see rapes? Or assaults or suicides?’

Fletcher: ‘Because of the nature of murder. There's nothing more destructive to the metaphysical fabric that binds us together than the untimely murder of one human being by another.’

What the department does is find out from the video feed that is generated from the wires sticking from the precogs' brains where the next murder is to happen and rush there to prevent it. They place the prospective criminal under arrest for the precrime of murder.

Because of their successful intervention, there hasn't been a single murder in the D.C. area (I think it's supposed to be a circle centred at the the precogs with a 200-mile radius). Let me now pause the narrative to point out the grievous logical flaws in this set-up.

First of all, let us all agree that we must not look for ultimate consistency in any piece of fantasy. This means that if you find that the fantasy violates one of Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism, that doesn't exactly invalidate the idea. However, it should necessarily be proof against simple logical contradictions that do not invoke laws of physics.

Let us grant that the precogs can indeed look into the future and write a DVD-quality video stream out of it. If what they see is the future, it is going to happen. If it doesn't happen, they fail in the prediction of the future. Simple. In every single “murder” in the past six years, the team arrived just in time to prevent the murder. So the precogs were wrong every time, since they represented the murder as actually taking place.

Do you think I'm just nitpicking? Read the conversation carefully. Someone only intending to kill his boss or wife is not enough; he must actually go through with it. In other words, a mere tendency is not enough, the thing must happen. If the precogs see the future correctly, they should see that the precrime team arrives at the “crime scene” and prevents the murder. Except that they can't, because since the murder has been prevented there's no unparalleled destruction of the metaphysical fabric that binds us all to cause them to see it, so that the murder will take place, in which case they will foresee and prevent it, which they can't because there's no unparalelled ….

Okay, let us sympathize with the fantasy for a moment and rescue it from a death so early. Let us suppose that the precogs see, in addition to murders, murder-related arrests at scenes that just “smell of violence”, because these distort the metaphysical fabric too. With this little fix, you may have difficulty in getting a grip on the causality, but that is not necessarily fatal to the movie's premise. Let me explain.

Say I see a man seated on a bench, and I have a loaded gun with me. I draw it and prepare to shoot him, or so it appears to somebody (a third person) at the scene. If I fully intend to shoot the guy and proceed firmly in that direction, I will be prevented. Because the precogs will see it, and the precops will come swooping down on me. But if I'm only putting on a show for the guy watching me, none of this will happen. So far so good. Now what if I am myself uncertain and keep changing my mind? Do the planes in which the cops were arriving suddenly disappear when I decide not to shoot him? Only to reappear when the next second I decide I am going to shoot him after all? If my thoughts cause the flights, it sure looks impossible.

But this objection is in fact invalid. There is no proof that my not knowing what I am going to do is tantamount to it being uncertain. In other words, the threads in the metaphysical fabric can know what is going to happen. In fact, I recently read that test subjects in a scientific experiment were asked to report a certain choice the instant they made it (the choice being something like which hand to lift from the armrest), and the researchers found, by sticking some instruments in the body to measure some pulse or whatever, that the actual choice was made well before the subjects actually thought they were making the choice. They could reliably predict what the subjects would do before they expressed their choice.

Let us grant the film this much. Both the immediate past and the future event (as predicted by the precogs) are dead certain, but the path to get to the event is variable. And let us ignore that the precogs report the murder as actually taking place, so that we can get on with the story.

Just after John Anderton (Tom Cruise), precrime chief, finishes the demonstration to Witwer, one of the precogs (Agatha) grabs him and cries ‘can you see?’ while showing him some murder-by-drowning on the big screen on the roof, which is controlled by her brain (remember the DVD-quality feed?). When he digs it up in the archives (it is supposed to be one of the earliest pre-murders handled by the system), Agatha's stream is missing. The victim is a certain Anne Lively, who is untraceable. Our hero takes this problem to his mentor and creator of the precrime idea, Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow). A minute into the conversation, I knew Lamar was crooked (I guess I am a precog too—I'm certainly aberrant). I have felt the sensation before, and it didn't augur well for me.

Shortly afterwards, John Anderton finds out, while at work, that the next victim is to be a Leo Crow, to be killed by John Anderton himself in thirty-six hours. Startled that he is about to kill someone he does not even know, he begins to run. He gets his eyeballs changed (to escape detection by the automated eye readers that are everywhere, which would identify him) and tries to determine how this mistake happened (surely it's a mistake?). The answer, he learns, might lie in what are called minority reports. A minority report is supposed to be a dissenting opinion from among the three precogs. They don't always see an event the same way.

Even kidnapping Agatha proves futile, since she says there is no minority report about his crime. You, being as smart as you are, are no doubt wondering why he didn't choose a sure-fire way to prove his innocence (pre-innocence?), such as locking himself somewhere and agreeing to be continuously monitored (through a window, perhaps) until the appointed hour. Surely he knew that all pre-arrests were made at the scene? Let it pass; he wasn't thinking, which undoubtedly the metaphysical fabric sensed.

His city-trotting with Agatha takes him to the room (never mind the details) where he's supposed to kill Leo Crow (what do you know!), a few minutes before the event (Agatha is with him). There he discovers incriminating evidence that Leo Crow killed his young son. We know at this point that Anderton losing his son was what brought him to precrime and caused his divorce. Anderton is enraged and vows to actually kill the bastard. I was hoping that finally a crime would go down as predicted, but nonsense would strike again. Anderton comes to his senses at the last moment and arrests him, wearily blurting out the Miranda warning. Crow is stunned.

Crow: ‘You're not gonna kill me? If you don't go through with this, my family gets nothing, okay? You're supposed to kill me. He said you would.’

Anderton: ‘He? Who's he?’

Crow: ‘I don't know. He called on my cell. He told me I'd be released if I went along, and my family would be taken care of.’

Anderton: ‘If you did what? If you did what?’

Crow: ‘If I acted like I killed your kid, okay?’

After some more dialogue, Crow manages to pull the trigger on himself, and falls out the glass window. This, of course, is very different from what the precogs envisioned. It gets worse.

Witwer approaches Burgess with the same evidence of wrongdoing as Anderton did. Burgess shoots him with Anderton's gun and frames Anderton for this murder too. (The principal precog, Agatha, is cavorting about with Anderton, remember?) Anderton is arrested for the two murders he allegedly committed (yeah, the Crow “murder” too).

At a felicitation ceremony for Burgess, things go haywire. Agatha, who has so far only been a precog, temporarily turns postcog, in order to tell the world the awful truth about Burgess. It turns out that he murdered Anne Lively (who is Agatha's mother) because she had come back to fetch Agatha. Since that would've meant the destruction of the fledgling precrime experiment, Burgess set up an elaborate charade to fool the precrime technicians. This, of course, is supposed to be a captivating narrative, but once again you wonder why he didn't do something simpler and safer, like tying her up completely and feeding her to a hungry lion (no metaphysical-fabric destruction there, since animals cannot murder).

Let us now re-visit the grandiose framing of Anderton for the murder of Leo Crow because he had grown too nosy. How did Burgess pull it off?

If you proceed to shoot somebody with a gun, you can be sure of attracting the precogs' attention, since your success would mean the failure of the precogs, which is an impossibility. But how did putting some fake pictures and a guy in some room in a building lead to Anderton getting involved? From Burgess's point of view, it was perfectly possible that the guy and his pictures go would unnoticed for ever and ever.

Mind you, this does not mean that, if the “murder” caught on in the fibres of the metaphysical fabric, there would be internal inconsistency. Anderton learning of his future crime and rushing out to save himself and ending up murdering the guy exactly as predicted does not lead to logical contradictions. It seems to have circular causality, but nature is allowed to operate in strange ways. But since Burgess planned this, we do wonder how he thought such an improbable scheme could work. How could he foresee the circular causality?

Let me conclude by making some more brief remarks about the whole set-up.

• What happens if I add poison to something that I know somebody will eat in the near future? This is murder, but how does it show up in the video feed? What happens if I set up a fatal booby trap for someone while taking care not to be anywhere near it when it happens?
• How is it that the precogs are somehow automatically also great legal minds? If I fatally drive my car into someone while in an inebriated state, that's manslaughter, not murder. Do the precogs know this and therefore ignore it? If so, they will fail to prevent a lot of killings. It is sometimes difficult to judge whether a certain act is murder or something lesser even in the hypothetical, i.e. even when we posit all the relevant facts. Precogs, I suppose, are hardwired to do the legal calculations automatically.
• Using the precrime method, a premeditated pre-murderer can always get off by arguing (correctly) that he knew his actions would not lead to the death of the previctim, since precrime fighters were sure to arrive on the scene and stop him. This effectually nullifies intent. How do the precrime prosecutors ever get convictions?

I could go on and on, but I think I have made a convincing case for why this movie is preposterous in the extreme.

Ashok | 10/24/2008 10:58:00 AM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 0 Blogspot comments |

The human race is pretty stupid when it is afraid.

Or even if it is not, the assumption is constantly made. Does everybody just think ‘I'm not stupid, but my racemates must be, so I better not complain’ or are people really not derisive of their anti-virus's “strong recommendation” that they scan their whole computer for viruses daily or weekly?

Everyone who has used a computer (running Windows) for a while has surely experienced a virus attack at one time or another, but does it mean we don't hold out to the unceasing anti-virus attack on our computer resources? Actually, it can be very easy to ward off viruses with minimum computer-resource expenditure if anti-viruses and other software cooperate.

Anything that cannot execute (itself or through a parent program) is harmless. It's that simple. A GIF image can never have a virus. Despite all the warnings you may get, I guarantee you that you can download any e-mail attachment whatsoever and open it with Notepad without the slightest risk of virus infection. The reason is obvious: the OS is only ever “looking at” these files, never “listening to” them. So at worst the contents are garbled or nonsensical. From this it follows that it is enough if you scan foreign executables before using them. This naturally includes anything that is run by other programs, such as macros or scripts. In an ideal world, you would know when you were about to start such a executable and would ask the anti-virus to make sure there was no mischief the code would do, or if you were going to be dealing with a lot of foreign executables, turn on continuous monitor temporarily. But we don't live in an ideal world.

By a conspiracy among the software companies and the hardware companies, things are too often using up more RAM and CPU needlessly. Your OS never tells you what it's doing with your computer. Even the harmless GIFs and TXTs pose a potential problem because Windows may decide that GIFs should have some execution capability—code encapsulated in metadata—that will tell Windows to do something to “delight the user” with some snazzy crap.

This allows your anti-virus to warn you solemnly that you need to keep your database constantly updated and perhaps scan the computer fully after every update, which might well be daily. It's certainly wise to update quite frequently, because it's so fast, but it's absurd to scan your whole computer anywhere nearly as frequently as your software suggests. They naturally want to exaggerate their own importance.

In my opinion, it's best to keep the anti-virus at some low level of continous monitor (because you never know when something is executed) and to completely turn off scheduled full scans. Perform a full scan only if something extraordinary has happened that makes you suspect that there may be resident viruses.

Ashok | 4/22/2008 07:02:00 AM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 0 Blogspot comments |

That is the new law of today, or so it would seem.

What do you think will happen in a “debate” on TV if somebody said “Girls in general obviously lack the ability to produce serious mathematical or scientific research output”? Eveybody will pounce on the poor soul and condemn him/her for “unacceptable prejudice and outrageous lies”.

I think that a prejudice for the truth is very healthy, and that there ought never to be anything offensive about the truth. There's a overwhelming mass of empirical data to validate the above statement—and many others like it; yet in the media it's “obviously true” that women and men are equally creative/intelligent/motivated/whatever. In other words, politically correct equals factually correct.

Have you noticed how people manage to find some sort of literary criticism too whenever you offend against propriety by improperly letting the monkey known as fact usurp King PC?

Ashok | 3/09/2008 03:29:00 PM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 2 Blogspot comments |

Really?

“Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits (in the classic formulation). Now, it's long been understood—very well—that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can.

“At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, and sympathy, and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in special interests that it serves, but the conditions of survival—let alone justice—require rational social planning in the interest of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global community.

“The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival.”—Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent

Ashok | 3/07/2008 02:11:00 AM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 4 Blogspot comments |

Anybody who is discerning in the matter of arguments and can pick bad ones to pieces will relish the superb series called Evolution vs Creation, hosted on YouTube.com and by a cocky Janet Folger. The links to the eleven parts are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. Here is a brief quote from the beginning of the second part.

Is the Bible in conflict with science? The answer is no. But evolutionists are ultimately forced to take that stance because their theories are in conflict with what the Bible teaches. And yet, the truth is, the Bible is full of scientific facts. And the so-called science of evolution is the one that over time's proven itself to be the one that simply cannot stand up to scrutiny.

Do you like being on the cutting edge of knowledge? The Bible has always been years ahead of scientists. It is one of the most advanced science books around. In its pages are the answers to the mysteries of life and the invisible laws of the universe.

If you don't know what Design (or Intelligent Design or, for our purposes, Creation) is, then you can start at the Wikipedia article. If you prefer a very brief introduction, here is a couple of paragraphs taken from Wikipedia.

Intelligent design is the claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a modern form of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, modified to avoid specifying the nature or identity of the designer. Its primary proponents, all of whom are associated with the Discovery Institute, believe the designer to be God. Intelligent design's advocates claim it is a scientific theory, and seek to fundamentally redefine science to accept supernatural explanations.

Irreducible complexity (IC) is the argument that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, and are at the same time too complex to have arisen naturally through chance mutations. It is one of several arguments intended to support intelligent design creationism The originator of irreducible complexity as it applies to intelligent design, biochemistry professor Michael Behe, defines an irreducibly complex system as one "composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning". These examples are said to demonstrate that modern biological forms could not have evolved naturally.

I submit that evolution and ID are a falsely contrasted pair. Further, I think any rebuttal of anything said or written by a Creationist should begin: “Showing some specific claims made by today's scientists about how life evolved on earth to be untrue or doubtful does not in any way prove the validity of ID or anything else you seek to vindicate. ID is in no way an alternative theory to or the logical negation of evolution. It is therefore not true that exactly one of them is true.” That will not drive away the hardcore Christian fanatics like Janet Folger, whose addled brains can never comprehend logic, and who think that the fact that somebody once faked a fossil find proves that the Bible was edited by an army of fact-finders, and who will no doubt work some fresh piece of unmitigated dumbness around this telling blow, but it will save the ordinary semi-religious layperson an anxious moment of doubt or two.

If you accept the conclusions from physics (supported by a mountain of evidence) about how the earth came into being, you know that the earth started off without life as we know it. Therefore life started at some point. Therefore it either began on earth or it was brought to earth by an external agent (such as a meteorite). It seems very implausible that the millions of species were each brought in their present form by one meteorite or successive meteorites.

The idea that one species transformed into another is therefore logically suggested, since the idea that elements spontaneously combined one fine thunderclap to form something so complex as a human is preposterous. This evolution idea is strengthened by the observation that organisms do possess the ability to change themselves from generation to generation. Now, it is possible that some (or many) of the specific claims made by evolutionists are wrong. After all, what branch of science has ever produced a theory at the outset that was correct in every fine detail? It is indeed possible that a number of minor details will never be worked out completely satisfactorily. The general conclusion, however, about the origin of species seems inescapable to me.

ID gives some profound answers to all questions you may have. Some examples:

How did the first human come to the earth? —The Designer brought him.

Was each species individually designed by the designer? —Yes, he's omnipotent.

Is there any time scale associated with his designs? When did he design what? —He designed everything when he designed it.

Why did he design as he did? Why are humans not asexual? Why do we have an appendix? —His designs are his own; they are not open to criticism.

This theory can be extended to all areas of human endeavour where questions are involved:

How do planets, asteroids, and satellites stay in orbit? —The Designer keeps them in orbit.

Why am I so bad at singing? —The Designer made you thus.

Which is the hundredth Mersenne prime, if it exists? And are there infinitely many of them? —The Designer knows if it exists or not and if it exists, he knows what it is. Also, there are or are not infinite Mersenne primes according as the Designer wanted there to be infinitely many of them or not.

Are quarks and gluons the ultimate building-blocks of matter? —The ultimate building-blocks of matter are what the Designer intended the ultimate building-blocks of matter to be.

Of course, ascribing all truths to the will of the Designer is incontrovertible, because, being figurative, the description can match anything at all. What the Creationists are saying, in effect, when they say that evolution is wrong and ID is correct, is that scientists will never break down the structure of the Designer, i.e. they will never be able to say whether he is complete randomness or a fundamental physical force hitherto not measured or what have you.

Whether that is true, only time will tell. But it is obviously no theory or explanation that no explanation will ever be found. Creationists need to understand that scientists want to answer all possible hows. Or, if you will, they want to know how the Designer did what he did. They want to know if he's still active, under what conditions he designs, etc.—basically completely document his will and his modus operandi. Scientists are not content to label origin of life “beyond our reach”.

If the Creationists insist that it happened in an instant, then theirs becomes a theory, albeit an absurd counterintuitive one that is corroborated by absolutely no evidence (when was the last time you were walking on the street and a dog materialized before your eyes out of nowhere?). It should be clear why I think ID-vs-evolution is a falsely contrasted pair. The latter is a theory about how it happened and continues to happen, while the former says “enough is enough; don't touch this subject any more”.

Ashok | 9/20/2007 07:33:00 PM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 0 Blogspot comments |

Superscientific gibberish is not hard to encounter in everyday life: people are always justifying their pet idiosyncratic beliefs as scientifically proven; a lot of traditional Indian rituals and “values” have firm roots in superscientific gibberish. It is alarming, however, to find it in a TV show that purports to deliver the inside dope on (forensic) science.

The show I'm talking about is CSI, which has very high ratings in America. I'm not distressed by the cast having conversations among themselves for the benefit of the audience, but I am distressed by the following. (Well, it's not the same kind of gibberish, but since it is about science, it qualifies.)

(Season 1, episode 10. The CSI team determines the time of death using an analysis of bugs found on the corpse (murder victim), but the DA refuses to prosecute on that because that kind of investigation is not well understood and appears to be shaky. Sara is disappointed that a killer might walk.)

Grissom: ‘Every civilization learns what it needs to know, and the next one forgets it. The sheriff …. Well, it's not personal.’

(Pause)

Sara: ‘We're part of the cycle.’

‘And they laughed at fingerprints seventy years ago, and now it's a law.’

‘Except, somebody had to push for prints. And you're standing there, saying “All things in their own time.”’

‘You're confused, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘That's the best place for a scientist to be.’ (amidst the beginnings of solemn music)

Ashok | 9/13/2007 05:34:00 AM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 0 Blogspot comments |

Most people know that when a ball is picked at random from a bag containing three red balls and five black balls, there is a three-eighths chance of it being red. This is very fundamental and is almost an axiom of probability. However, people often erroneously extend this simple calculation to situations where it doesn't apply.

Two teams—call them Lefts and Rights—have played eleven games, out of which the Lefts won eight. What is the probability that the Lefts will win the twelfth game, assuming that each team has a fixed probability of winning a particular game, irrespective of previous results?

A lot of people would answer eight-elevenths, and some would get confused and say fifty-fifty. Now suppose there had been only three games and the Lefts had won all of them. Would the probability of them winning the fourth now be one, meaning a certainty? Obviously not! The FIIT-JEE booklet on probability that I read found an elegant solution to this, namely that the probability of something being one does not necessarily mean that it is a certainty.

For those of you who know better than to believe that idiotic claim but don't know the solution, here it is:

Don't worry if you don't follow the first line. I'll explain that later. The second line gives you the probability of a team winning the next match when they have already won m games and lost n. Going back to the first problem, the chances of the Lefts winning the twelfth game are not really 8/11, but 9/13. You can verify that this formula never produces a counter-intuitive answer. Two points are worth noting here:

• The teams must have a fixed probability of winning any particular match that is going to take place; this is never true in real games, with a lot of variables playing a part.
• In making this calculation, it is assumed that at the beginning this fixed probability of the match going a particular way is completely unknown; i.e. it could equally well be any value between and including zero and one. This means, for one, that for the first game (as given by the formula), the chances of either team winning are equal. Hasty people will do ludicrous things with the result, e.g. claiming that in the first match between the world champions and a new entrant, it is “mathematically proven” that the result is a fifty-fifty, forgetting that this precisely is an assumption used in deriving the result.

(Coming to the first formula, it is an intermediate step in the derivation of the final formula that can be completely ignored by those who don't have at all a mathematical background. It gives you the probability density function of the fixed probability, θ, on the basis of number of matches won by each side.)

Labels: Probability

Ashok | 5/12/2007 05:08:00 PM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 0 Blogspot comments |

• I wonder if there can ever be true lawlessness among non-“living” beings. (I don't want to talk about living beings here.) I think formerly it was assumed that a lack of complete determinism was lawlessness. By this view, a tossed coin is lawless. But, as we all know, probabilistic laws govern the result of the tossed coin.
  
  Is there anything at all that doesn't even follow a probabilistic law? This is a complex question, and I hope to write about this later. But for the present, if you agree that anything that is “lawful” is unconscious, it's fairly obvious that there is no God. You can call the laws of nature God, but that would hardly be in accordance with the religious, conscious, God.
• It is well known that brotherhood, friendship, etc. are necessarily mutual. It is my theory that so are crushes/attractions so long as the two persons involved interact at the “same level”. That last condition is meant to exclude celebrity–fan, teacher–student, and other such situations where one person is clearly “higher up”.
  
  Numerous movies depict situations in contradiction with this theory (love triangles, quadrilaterals, etc.), and, for this reason, I don't find them very believable.
• A common illogicality in writing and speech arises from the failure to understand the concepts of maximum, minimum, and optimum. A maximum is the biggest numerical value in a group, and a minimum, the smallest such value. To maximize (a variable) is to pick that possible value which is the maximum, and similarly to minimize is to pick the minimum.
  
  An optimum is the value of a variable that maximizes or minimizes a certain other, dependent, variable. Needless to say, all these variables must be quantifiable. The optimum thickness of the pipe was found to be two millimetres means that this was the value which, for example, maximized the rate of fluid flow through the pipe. It would be highly unusual for a variable to optimize two dependent variables simultaneously, and claims to that effect are usually the result of confusion. Same is the case with two dependent variables being maximized simultaneously.

  Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.—Winston Churchill

Ashok | 3/31/2007 01:43:00 PM | Link to this post | |  Add (for registered users) to / Read 0 Blogspot comments |