a pick me up

So, I just finished an episode of Buffy that had to be some of the saddest 43 minutes of television ever created. Joss sure knows how to tug on those heartstrings.

So let's talk about something happy. When I was in MN this summer I tried a concoction of Sierra Mist and some Falconer Vineyards Rose. It was heavenly. When I got back to Ohio I polished off the two bottles I brought home with me and then found a few good bottles in the wine store that's about 100 meters from my back door. I used 7up instead of Sierra Mist and liked it even better. Then I got to thinking, what else would go well with 7up? The Girlfriend and I tried a bottle of Sangria from local supermarket and that tasted delicious. I found that mixing 7up with orange juice creates a refreshingly zesty morning beverage. And just tonight I mixed some 7up with my Lipton's Green Tea. For all you tea lovers out there, Lipton's Green Tea is more like lemonade than tea, but that's exactly how I like it.

So before you start planning an intervention, I haven't been mixing my citrus soda with cocaine and I'm not planning on turning my apartment into a "sprite house." Does anyone else have any fun drink ideas that involve 7up?

-SP

If you could bottle and sell "badass."

The game that's been dominating my time: Batman Arkham Asylum. I paraphrase Joystiq.com when I say this game is more than a Batman game it's a Batman simulator. You feel as though you've stepped right into the Dark Knight's kevlar reinforced, henchman kicking, Joker stomping boots. You want batarangs? Check. You want the ability to stalk your prey from atop a gargoyle, then swoop down through a skylight, cape outstretched, boots connecting to the back of his head as if you were the very avatar of Justice herself? Done. Do you want to solve crimes and track evidence as the Worlds Greatest Detective? No problem. Do you want to clear a room full of bad guys with moves that would make Chuck Norris urinate in his trousers? You got it.

Few games have brought me such unmitigated glee as Batman Arkham Asylum. True, I'm a huge Batman fanboy, and that might be biasing my perspective, but I'm also a gamer and I know video games and I know production quality and this game just shimmers with polish. The voice acting is done by the cast of Batman: The Animated Series. Kevin Conroy reprises as the voice of Batman, and in my opinion no one does a better job. Mark Hamill (yes THAT Mark Hamill) voices the Joker with the kind of intense insanity that does justice to the mythology. The rest of the cast is also in tip-top form. The cut-scenes are beautiful, the music perfect, and all the pieces fall into place to make this an exceptional game.


Do you see that? That's your call to action.
Pick up the game, I implore you. You can't imagine what havoc the Joker will wreck if left to his devices.

A fight for Independence

Docula had a great comment on my last PSA and I'd like to touch a little on what he said.

Let's talk a little about statistical independence. Loosely speaking, we say two events, A and B, are independent, if knowing that event A occurs does not change the probability that event B occurs.
E.g. Let A = the event that I play Rock Band 2 tomorrow. Let B = the event that Fast Eddie eats a salad for lunch tomorrow. These events are logically independent since my video gaming habits are not going to affect Eddie's lunching habits.

A little more complicated: Suppose you have a standard deck of playing cards. Suppose you're going to draw two cards. Let A be the even that the first card drawn is black. Let B be the event that the second card drawn is black.
Are these events independent?



Well, the probability that A occurs, denoted P(A), is 26/52 = # of black cards / # of cards total = 1/2

What's P(B)?

Well, if you drew a red card on the first draw, then P(B) = 26/51 (26 black cards but only 51 cards left)
If you drew a black card on the first draw, the P(B) = 25/51 (25 black cards (since you got one on the first draw) out of 51 cards left)

So P(B) changed DEPENDING on what you got on the first draw. So P(B) DEPENDS on what happened with A. Hence, these two events are dependent.

So why is this sometimes counter-intuitive? Suppose that I have a fair coin. By fair I mean that on each flip, the coin is as likely to land heads as it is to land tails. P(heads) = .5 = P(tails). Coin flips are independent. If I flip a coin and it lands heads then it's no more or less likely to come down heads on the next flip. Easy to say, but in practice this throws a lot of people off. Let's say I plan to flip a coin 10 times. The first 9 flips all come down heads

H H H H H H H H H

I pause for a moment and say, "what do you think it will land on the next, and last, flip?" We all (including me) have the urge to say "Tails! For the love of Buddha this string of heads is improbable!" This sentiment was dangerously echoed by some gamblers I observed when working at Treasure Island Resort and Casino. These gamblers would sit by the electronic roulette machine with notepads and they would write down the color and number of each outcome of the spin of the virtual roulette wheel. They would then attempt to use this information to help them predict the next outcome. At the most basic level of statistics just discussed, this would be a good strategy if the events were....drum roll please....dependent. If the spins of a roulette wheel were dependent then knowing something about previous outcomes could give you some information about future outcomes.
But...just like a coin flip, the spins of roulette wheel are INdependent. If that weren't true, then you would have to believe that the little wooden ball (or computerized wooden ball) somehow remembers what it has landed on and in the future will act upon that knowledge. If these men saw the ball had landed red 5 times in a row, they would probably bet on black for the next spin. This is FOLLY! Just because I flip 9 heads in a row doesn't mean the last flip is more likely to be tails. The coin doesn't remember that it just landed heads up 9 times in a row.

People have a false intuition about this empirical law called the Law of Averages, which, roughly put, states that thing even out after a while. I might get more into that in a different post, as it deserves it's own clever title.

Some real world applications? If you win the lottery using your favorite 10 digit number, there's no reason why you shouldn't keep playing that number afterwards.



If you haven't already, please, for me, watch (or read) Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It's the funniest, cleverest thing you'll ever put your eyes on. The first ten minutes are a beautiful homage to probability theory.






p.s. something to think about. suppose that people flip coins for fun. you know, for choosing between two movies, dates, desserts, colors of ties, etc. Suppose that the average coin is flipped 100 times in it's lifetime. Meaning someone flips the coin then buys something with it and the next person to get that coin flips it for some reason or another etc. Now, do you think that somewhere out there is a coin that's always landed heads? It's been passed around from person to person and no one single individual would notice, but could there be a coin out there that's been flipped 100 times and every time the coin has come down heads? How many coins would there need to be in circulation for this to have a better than 50% chance of happening? Is this coin magical?

The Ghost in the Machine

I was just typing an email to my Cousin, when Gmail started to lag. I would type in a word and at about 1/4 the speed, the letters would appear on my screen. I paused the think about what I was going to say next, then typed out a whole sentence very quickly. I sat back in my chair and watched as the letters popped up one by one, about a letter a second. It made me feel strange, as though I were in some 1980's movie where the fledgling programmer has created an artificial intelligence program and is reading it's birthing cry. Luckily, the words that appeared on the screen were the words that I typed and not something like [skynet online].


And now for one of my random thoughts:

I just watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which Cordelia, heartbroken and furious, lays the blame for all her misfortune on Buffy and in her anger makes a wish. "I wish Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale!" Little did she know that the new girl in school was a wish-granting spirit with a man-hating streak. So spirit girl grants Cordelia's wish and Cordelia is whisked away to...you guessed it...a dystopian parallel present. Lesson learned: the Hellmouth is fraught with spirits wishing to dish up a steaming plate of irony. The parallel "What if?" reality at which Cordelia arrives is pretty much the worst of all possible worlds and she soon finds herself dead. I guess, Giles finds her dead... When dystopian Giles guesses what's happening he sets about to cancel the wish. Sidenote: vampire-cum-goth Xander and Willow make a super hot couple.
D-Giles "saves" the day by smashing an artifact,



thus reinstating the original Buffy-full reality.

My point: In so many fantasy and/or sci-fi stories, parallel realities get revoked, destroyed, squished or (and they should have a word for this) made to have never existed. What happens to those people? In back to the future 2, Marty creates a split in the space-time whatchamacallit and a dystopian Hill Valley comes into existence. He then fixes the space-time thingerdo and the future goes back to whatever it "should" have been. What about all the people in that splinter? What about all the babies born of unions that didn't happen in the "correct" future. All over the world people were just going about their lives, and who knows, maybe everywhere else people are happy and free and someone has invented an interstellar spacecraft. Shouldn't Marty be guilty of the murder of billions of people? Worse yet, what if they don't die, but their existence is revoked. Surely it is better to die than to have never existed at all. The thought makes me shudder.

Now back to my favorite flavor of dystopian realities:

More cowbell than you can handle

Free Energy Music Video

I'm sorry, my little linux powered netbook doesn't want to let me ebed the video. Therefore, follow the link to watch my big brother's first official music video. I'm so proud of him and I want to you all to feast your ears on this carpe diem anthem of love.

I promise I won't forget any of you once I ride my brother's coattails to rock-star nirvana.

Definitions

Does anyone else find this ad a little strange? The wait is over? You can preorder your Zune now and WAIT until September 15th to actually get it. Maybe I'm just arguing semantics. I mean, if, perhaps, you were waiting for the opportunity to preorder an iPod wannabe, then yes, your wait is over. However, if you're one of those people, I bet you really enjoy having cake as well.

SP out.

Public Service Announcement

So here's a fun idea, why don't I write about a couple of interesting facets of statistical thinking?

From my personal statement, part of my application to grad school:

Midway through my first probability course I began seeing the world in a different way. Absolutes gave way to probabilities, certainty to estimation, and placid acceptance to examination. Phrases like “mutually exclusive” crept into my daily parlance and the salad bar became much more interesting when order mattered.

---

To illustrate an interesting principle, let me summarize a problem from the Statistics: Concepts and Controversies lab book. I can't remember the actual numbers, so I'll make some up. The problem is a critical look at an article put out by the Associated Press. The article is basking in the improbability of a certain event. The event is that the past 16 births at the local hospital in some small town in Indiana have all been boys. Well, surely, if the probability is about 50% for either gender, we should have seen about 8 boys and 8 girls, right? The probability is not difficult to calculate. Assuming that the sexes of the babies were independent, the probability of 16 boys in a row is .5 to the 16th power. 0.5^16 = 0.00001525. If you were a gambler you wouldn't bet on it, right?

So the question is this: Is this story newsworthy?

Counter intuitively, the story is not newsworthy (in a statistical sense).

Why isn't the story newsworthy? Four years ago, according to the 2005 census, there were 7,569 hospitals in the USA. In every hospital across the country, children are being born. Is it so unlikely that one of those hospitals gets a run of male births? Think about it another way. Let's say you go to a baseball stadium with 7,568 of your closest friends. You all crowd onto the field and each of you pulls out a coin. I call out "go" over the loudspeaker and everyone starts to flip his or her coin. Each of the 7,569 people flips a coin 16 times and records the number of heads and tails.

After everyone's finished, someone in the middle of center field yells out "Holy Balls, I just got 16 heads in a row!"
Is this so unusual? Do you grab this guy, throw him in your trunk, and make him play craps for you in Vegas? For legal (and statistical reasons) I wouldn't. The punch-line is that if you work on a large enough scale, even outcomes with very small probability will eventually occur. Now, if you do the math, the probability that at least one person gets 16 heads in a row (or at least one hospital gets 16 males births in a row) is about 89%. That means that if I wanted to, I could find a hospital almost every day that had this exact same, "newsworthy," event.

About 10 years ago, a man won the lottery...for the 2nd time. Holy shit, you may exclaim, certainly Baby Jesus has blessed this man above all others. Ye, let us make a shrine to him and rub its bronze nose for luck before we watch the powerball drawing. Again, faulty logic. The fact is that many people play the lottery, and, in fact, many people who win the lottery keep playing afterwards. If you get enough repeat players, eventually one of them is going to win again. Some statistician claimed it would be about every 10 years, and about 8 years later someone else became a repeat lotto winner.


Now I'm getting long winded, but I want to give one more example of how this logic applies. Say that you're talking to a new coworker and after a while you find out that you both had golden retrievers as kids and that BOTH of you have sisters named Julia. Is this crazy? Are you soulmates? People ask me, what's the probability that you meet someone at random and you both have sisters with the same first name? It's not quite the correct question. You see, if you talk for long enough, you're bound to find something in common. So when you do, you tend to forget about the dozens of things you don't have in common, and fixate on what you share. That's fine, since that's how we develop interpersonal relationships, but it's not nearly as "weird" or "spooky" as it might appear to be.

blah blah blah, i'm done. did anyone find this interesting?

mama said knock you out

*whew* I just completed the first segment of Riddick. As insanely difficult as it was, it did a lot of things really well. The game did some beautiful things with light and shadow, there were also some genuinely funny moments.
Such as when you acquire a giant mechanized walker called the "heavy guard." You become a juggernaut of gatling weilding rocket launching fury. The armor talks to you during the segment giving advice to the "pilot" in a deep roboty voice.
armor: "Battle Analysis: Walk over smaller organic targets to conserve ammunition"
"Battle Analysis: Pilot should read instruction manual before operating Heavy Guard."
At the very end of these often hilarious recommendations you get
"Battle Analysis: Pilot should turn off auto Battle Analysis suggestions."

Kudos to you, oh creators of Escape from Butcher Bay. Now, on to the second (and final) portion: Assault on Dark Athena.

Something has been on my mind recently. What's up with the expression "You can't have your cake and eat it too." ?
I mean, I think I understand the meaning. It means one action is mutually exclusive of the other and both are equally desirable. You have to make a choice, you can either have your cake, or you can eat your cake, but you cannot do both. So this begs the question, who the hell wants to have some cake, but not eat it? I mean, do people really sit at the kitchen table with a huge slice of chocolate cake (presumably with a tall glass of milk) and debate this?

Inner monologue:

Hmmmm, this looks like delicious cake, I can't wait to eat it. But wait! If I eat the cake then I can't have the cake. Oh no! I am at an impasse since I do so enjoy simply possessing this piece of cake. Oh God why have you forsaken me?!?!?

I doubt it. So it seems like the only reason one would get cake would be to eat it. Right? So these two actions are not equally desirable, at least for me. There might be some weird cake hoarding fetishers out there, at which point the actions become unbalanced but in the other direction.

Can somebody please suggest an alternative to this phrase? Something like, you can't go out with a girl and sleep with her sister at the same time.

Anyway, we all know that the cake is a lie.

I hope you're not afraid of the dark.

So I just bought a used copy of "Chronicles of Riddick: Assualt on Dark Athena" and lemme tell you, I was extremely excited to get it. Before I go on a little rant I want to explain the concept of "Gamer Achievements" to those of you who don't have an Xbox 360. Built into the games are meta-awards called achievements. Once you complete or "unlock" an achievement you get the requisite number of points added to your Xbox Live account. So if I've played 5 games and gotten 2,000 points worth of achievements, that score is posted on my Xbox Live account and all my gamer friends can see what ahcievements I've unlocked in what games and how many points I have total. So, these don't have any functional use, they're mainly for your own sense of accomplishment and perhaps bragging rights. They look like this (like one of my last posts).



Now all your gamer buddies can see that you've been philandering.

Some of these achievements can be very straightforward, like "complete the first level of Star Wars: force unleashed."
Some of these achievements are quite devious like in Half-Life 2 the acheivement: "targeted advertisement." Use the Cross-Bow to pin an enemy to a billboard.

And the achievements vary in difficulty and value.

Aaaaaaanyway, I looked up the achievements for Dark Athena and you get some nice points for beating the game on the hardest difficultly. I can do that. Thought I. I've played for about 4-5 hours now and I can tell you, it's really fucking difficult. Why is the game so difficult on "hard"?

1) whenever you pick up a gun dropped by an enemy, you apparently reload the gun with semi-damp cotton balls. Thus, when you shoot an enemy with said gun, the enemy says, "Oy, you got my armor slightly damp. Now you shall die." And the enemy then shoots you a single time and since his gun is filled with depleted uranium rounds, you quickly explode.

2) If you manage to pull of a head-shot (which is a little tricky given your life expectancy when you enter the same zip code as an enemy, the enemy dies. If you don't shoot him in the head and instead, for instance, put 27 rounds into his chest, he simply snickers a little, then shoots you in your little toe, which causes your face to implode.

3) The point I'm at right now there are these little fuckers called Spider Turrets. These are robots, the size of a typical paramecium, that attach themselves to the walls. A good way to discover where these turrets are is to breathe. Once you breathe, the turrets lock onto your nearest vital organ and perforate it for your dying convenience. I honestly have no idea how to get past these things.

4) I'm sure there's going to be a #4. I mean, I'm about a tenth of the way into the game and already I'm bitching about how hard it is.

*edit*
#4) I forgot to mention, the enemies have really fast reflexes. If you come around a corner and there's a guard there, he'll shoot you before you can even turn. If you're hiding in the shadows and you take careful aim and shoot a guard in the head with an assault rifle, he'll still have time to shoot you before he dies.

XKCD

For those of us without iPhones

Google has an extremely robust set of queries you can send via text message (that's txt msg for those of you under 18). You simple text your query to 466453 and instantaneously (usually) you get a text message back with the information you want.

Google SMS

Usual text fees apply, but if you have an unlimited texts plan, I would highly recommend checking this out.

Uses: last night, I was playing Rainbow 6 and I got this word in my head. The word was "inimical." I texted
"Define: inimical" to 466453 and immediately I got

unfriendly: not friendly; "an unfriendly act of aggression"; "an inimical critic"
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

This is the first definition if you would have typed "define: inimical" into the google search engine. Pretty rad, no?

home is where the Xbox is

So it's been a great week in Columbus, OH. I've been living a life of leisure, playing videogames, watching movies, and reading two great books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami.

The Xbox games that own my life right now:

Rainbow 6: Las Vegas 2
Burnout Paradise
&
Crackdown


Between those and assimilating the arguments against intelligent design, I've been pretty "busy."
Can I just say, here and now, that Evolution is one of the most brilliant discoveries in the history of mankind.

Just a "come on" from the whores on 7th avenue

Tomorrow I turn my steering wheel towards Columbus, Ohio.
I used to make the drive from C-bus to St. Paul in one fell swoop, but as I've grown older and possibly wiser, I've decided to take it in two fell swoops. So I'll be staying in Bloomington, IL for a night and then landing in Glenn Ave. on Tuesday.

Things I miss about home:
My Xbox (two weeks worth of downloadable Rockband Content to peruse)
My bed (although those bastards at Howards Inn in Madison still haven't called me back to tell me they found my pillow)
My girlfriend (no, leave the glasses on, they get me hot)
My grocery store (I know exactly where they keep the dr. pepper)
My motorcycle (freedom on two wheels)

I'd like to give a huge shout-out to Mr. & Mrs. Gubbins for so graciously hosting me this past week plus. Also a big thanks to Gubbins Jr. for teaching me the true spirit of christmas.

SP out

clouds

Fuck you, Windows(R)

I decided to copy The Fighting Librarian and purchase a netbook for myself. For those of you unfamiliar with the now supersaturated market of "ultra-portable" computers, these are, simply, very small laptops with limited processing power.

Let me start by saying I love my Asus EEE PC. It's little, it's light, it's got a battery that will last past judgement day.


<---Actual size.




The Catch: It comes preinstalled with Windows XP.
I'm not a fan of Micro$oft, as most of you know, but I was going to swallow my pride for the sake of ultra-portable internet bliss.
So I get everything set up and I was surfing the web while watching a little Band of Brothers. And right as the courageous members of Easy Company were being shelled by the Germans while foxholed during the Battle of the Bulge...I got a virus. I got three viruses.
Windows informed me of this in the most annoying way possible. Three pop-up windows that could not be minimized or hidden. These windows informed me that my computer was infected and that I should click this link to clean the computer. The link brought me to a website proffering some anti-virus software for only 59.99. "Bullocks!" I exclaimed. I can live with a couple of viruses. exempli gratia: people live long happy lives with HPV.
So I close the pop-ups and go about my business. The thing is, these windows keep popping up. Literally every 20 seconds, these same three windows would pop up and obscure my entire screen, rendering my machine useless.
The thing is, the application sending these annoying pop-ups was hidden somewhere on my computer. I couldn't even find it and delete it. This process took me a long time since I would need to stop the search every 20 seconds to close those damn pop-up windows.

Eventually, I threw up my hands and decided to wipe that ungodly operating system from my hardware.

The solution:



Linux, sweet linux. Ubuntu is beautiful. Ubuntu is virus-free. Ubuntu costs nothing. The GUI is simple, efficient, and did I mention that it's free? Did I mention that it comes with a copy of OpenOffice which can open and edit word documents just like Windows Office? Did I mention that it's free?

So, I'll let you know how it goes, but so far so good. The installation wasn't exactly foolproof as my computer has no optical drive. I needed to install Ubuntu on a usb drive and make the drive bootable.

I gotta run, I'm in Luck, WI right now at West Denmark Family Camp. More on that later.

Sprocketplug Out

it gives you insomnia™

So it's finals week. That means a few things. It means I have to endure the begging and pleading of students: "But I'm only 15% away from an A, can't you do something?"
It means I have to grade hundreds of pages of exams.
It means I drink Red Bull.
It means that after I'm done grading at 12:00am, the residual caffeine in my blood keeps sleep just outside my grasp.
It means that as I write this I am semi-conscious and I am listening to Ingrid Michaelson's The Chain, a beautifully mellow song that ends in a lovely round:

So glide away on soapy heels
And promise not to promise anymore
And if you come around again
Then I will take, then I will take the chain from off the door

Plan for the summer:

1) Workout (for reals this time)
2) Learn French (a lá Rosetta Stone)
3) Play my newly bought (but not yet received) Rock Band 2
4) Film a movie following students about to take the Statistics Qualifier Exam

So the question is: What should I name my Rock Band? Here's the shortlist:

Rachel and the Lady Killers
The Stoic Unicorns
The OCD Elves
James Taylor Overdrive
Civil Hands
One Man Down
Challengers of Change
Aphrodite's Itch
Temporal Fugue
Inebriated Koala
The Sprangettes
Madrak and the Holy Rollers
P and the Values
Starbuck and the Vipers
Circular Logic


What would you call YOUR band?

His blood ran cold...

Yesterday was the second time that I've given a double red cell donation at my local Red Cross.




For those of you unfamiliar with this newfangled process, it works thusly. For a regular, whole blood donation, you give a pint of red goo straight from your vein to the bag. The three major constituents of blood (excluding white blood cells) are the red blood cells, plasma, and platelets. Without getting into too much detail (read: this could be bullshit I just made up), the plasma is the fluid, the red blood cells carry oxygen, and the platelets are an important factor in producing blood clots.




So, when you give a double red donation, you give twice as many red blood cells as you do during a regular donation...but you get your plasma and platelets back. No, they don't give you a doggy bag filled with icky yellow liquid, they run your blood through a centrifuge, spin out the red blood cells, which should be heavier (hemoglobin has iron in it, right?) than the rest of the junk. Then they give you back your platelets, plasma, and they throw in half a pint of saline solution at no extra charge. Wonderous, isn't it? They pause the donation at three separate times and give you back your fluids. It goes back through the same needle and you can't even feel it! The best part about the donation is that your blood can get to another person much faster because it doesn't need to hang around to get separated.

So, my first time through, I was sitting there, marveling at the wonders of modern science when my lips started to tingle. No worries, I thought, it's just nerves. But them my stomach started to twitch a little bit and I started to tremble. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I've given gallons of blood in my lifetime and never had any adverse effects. The donation ends and I need to sit for a good 20 minutes before I feel like moving.

I thought about it for a while and then I came up with a hypothesis (later confirmed by Sprocketplug Senior, Doctor of Medicine). It turns out that I was cold. Why, you ask? Well, during the return, they gave me a little more than half a pint of saline solution. That's just salt water, but it was being stored at room temperature, let's call it 67 degrees Farenheit. Normal body temp is around 98 degrees so that was a little shock to my system. I didn't recognize the feeling, because I've never gotten cold from the inside out. Weird, right?
Anyway, the second time was better since I brought a heavy sweatshirt and winter cap, but I still got the same trembly feeling. I might go back to just giving a pint of whole blood, but we'll see.

Sprocketplug out.

blogger ennui

So, I've been thinking about this blog quite a bit recently. I don't really know what I should do with it. I feel like I want to post more. Lord knows I can wax whimsical with the best of them...but I don't really know where to go.
I've thought about several things:

1. reviewing video games i've been playing
2. reviewing girlfriends that i've been sleeping with
3. talk about my life as an educator
4. discuss, in depth, the relative usefulness of foam vs. gel shaving cream
5. make fun of fast eddie

one idea that will come to fruition is this: for my birthday, which was last week sometime, Fast Eddie and wife gifted me a year subscription to Parents Magazine. On the usefulness scale, this gift ranks somewhere between partially chewed pen cap and 100mL of lukewarm hamster vomit. Not that the sentiment wasn't appreciated.
I've received the latest issue as well as two back issues and all I can think about is how I can defile it. you know, cut and paste ransom letters, mix and match pictures that imply vile and disgusting things.

Just thought I'd muse aloud (so to write) a little.

-Sprocketplug

Bistromatics

Yesterday, my friends and I spent a delightful evening at Dewey's Pizzeria in Grandview. When we were ordering pizzas, two friends, Roland and David, each ordered a small (eleven inch) pizza. The waitress said, "It would be cheaper if you bought a 17 inch pizza and split it."
I pondered, cheaper, maybe, but would they get the same amount of pizza?
So I pulled out a napkin, grabbed a sharpie, and did a little bistromathics.

It was a simple calculation, finding the surface area of an 11 inch pizza and comparing that to half the surface area of a 17 inch pizza*, but the activity drew a few exasperated sighs.

I say, why accept a premise on faith when you can prove or disprove it with a few simple mathematical tools? If we let enough of those moments slip by, we become slaves to hearsay and speculation.

Sprocketplug

[dictated but not read in the penthouse of an ivory tower]




* circle with diameter 11 inches has surface area
= π * r^2 = π*5.5^2 ≅ 95.03 in^2

circle with diameter 17 inches has surface area
= π * r^2 = π*8.5^2 ≅ 226.98 in^2
So half that would be approximately 113.5 in^2

It's coming.

Outlander

Space Dragons, Bitches!