http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:51:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Hilarious news from California: the Governator apparently sent a veto message to the legislature in which the first word of each column spells "fuck you." You can read about it here and here. His spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted as saying "My goodness. What a coincidence. I suppose when you ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=30 You are an octopus who loves sushi. Every friday night, you visit the local sushi restaurant and chow down. Your favorite sushi is the Spider Roll and least favorite is Tako. But, you are the kind of octopus who really likes variety---a totally random mix of sushi. Unfortunately, you go to ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=28 Here's a thought which recently came up: optimization problems with many possible solutions are more likely to have a single best solution than optimization problems with few solutions. A problem with 10 possible solutions is more likely to have multiple "best" solutions than one with 1000 possible solutions. Why might ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=27 A few days ago when I was riding home on the T with John Kraemer, we ran into his friend, Brian Olson, a guy from google who has some neat political-computational ideas. Pretty quickly on the ride home, he sold me on the idea of fair redistricting, which is meant ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=22 Just saw a talk by Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl. I expected him to resemble a stereotype of computer network admins, but he showed up in a surprising form: wearing all brown, an apparently Australian cowboy hat, and a horseshoe mustache (thanks wikipedia!). He gave a bizarre talk consisting ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=21 This situation came up in Rebecca's class last Wednesday. Some students had gathered data that, looked something like this made up version: This shows for each subject, their RTs on two conditions of the experiment (Green/Blue). If you throw this sucker into the paired t-test, you find that the difference between ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=20 David told me a good one last night. Here it is: Suppose that there is a machine which can perfectly predict the future. It is never wrong. You get to play the following game with it. Two boxes are in a room and you can come into the room and open ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=19 Here's the most amazing thing I read recently (in Mar-Apr edition of American Scientist--probably the best science writing around--which attributed this puzzle to David Blackwell). Suppose that you write down two numbers, each on a slip of paper. You shuffle them up and put them, face-down, on a table. I am ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=18 I played around with a fun problem this weekend with Celeste. We started to talk about descendants and ancestors. What are the odds that someone descended from me will be alive T years in the future? What are the odds I will have no descendants in 10000 years? What is ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=17 I was recently watching some kids play in the airport. They had a toy airplane that they would wave around through the air and pretend it would fly. I was thinking about what makes play so much fun, and then realized that whenever I learn something new, I also enjoy ... http://piantado.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?p=16