Visualizing Mortality

The Author is 34 and expecting to live to 90. If you are 17 expecting to live to 73, you have half as many X's and exactly the same number of winters. Your odds of living past 73 are pretty good but the shocking lack of infiniteness is unchanged.

Notably, the number of days you get to spend with your parents is probably already past the halfway mark. OTOH, the number of days you deliberately choose to spend with your parents may be much, much below halfway.

I Could Outrun a T-Rex

Two studies say that the Tyranasaurus Rex could not have been the fiercely fast predator shown in Jurassic Park. One says he would have run out of energy before he got up to speed. The other says his bones were not strong enough to handle the weight at high speeds.

Math 10 Exams

The link to the BC Math 10 sample exams is here. (Direct links below)

Digital Pictures of Propellers Look Funny

Here's an animation to show you why.

Two Views of Intelligence

Do you think you're a natural at science? ...math? ...English? Sorry to hear that.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort or acquirable skills, not fixed ability, they can be remedied by perseverance. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

Survivor Bias

Survivorship bias in a nutshell: If you look at a profession and think: "Wow, that is full of the most skillful, smart, dynamic and interesting people I've ever seen!", should you join that profession or avoid it? David McRaney says, "not so fast." The same thinking applies to aspiring actresses, WWII bombers and businesses.

Before you emulate the history of a famous company, Kahneman says, you should imagine going back in time when that company was just getting by and ask yourself if the outcome of its decisions were in any way predictable. If not, you are probably seeing patterns in hindsight where there was only chaos in the moment.

BTW, this is just one post. McRaney's blog (You Are Not So Smart) is full of long, interesting, thoughtful posts on how people think. He loves the counter-intuitive.

Math Story of the Year

skepticism failure

What if Memorization IS Teaching How to Learn?

They say kids need to memorize their arithmetic. Other "they"s say kids need to learn how to figure things out on their own. Now they say memorization builds the brain that can figure things out.
 
(The "math wars" refers to a battle between math teachers that has been going on at least three decades now: to emphasize understanding or performance?)

High-School Crushes - Anylysed Mathematically!

John Paulos considers some statistics relevant to romantic crushes.

The second relevant statistical notion is Bayes’s theorem, a mathematical proposition that tells us how to update our estimates of people, events and situations in the light of new evidence.

A mathematical example: Three coins are before you. They look identical, but one is weighted so it lands on heads just one-fourth of the time; the second is a normal coin, so heads come up half the time; and the third has heads on both sides.

Pick one of the coins at random. Since there are three coins, the probability that you chose the two-headed one is one-third. Now flip that coin three times. If it comes up heads all three times, you’ll very likely want to change your estimate of the probability that you chose the two-headed coin.

Bayes’s theorem tells you how to calculate the new odds; in this case it says the probability that you chose the two-headed coin is now 87.7 percent, up from the initial 33.3 percent.

You're Over-Thinking It

Scientific progress went much quicker in the 1800's. We figured out the electric motor, electricity,  steam train, engine, car, typewriter, mechanical calculator, telegraph, fiber optics, telephone, record player, movie, sewing machine, rubber, plastic, photograph, revolver, dynamite, antiseptic, pasteurization,


Nowadays, electronic devices become ever-smaller, medicine becomes ever more sophisticated but it seems our massive research efforts are just fine-tuning details. At best, we are just optimizing the great discoveries of yesteryear.

Around 1900, people discussed the idea that science must end. We had already discovered everything. My father ruminated on the thought through the 50's and asked me during the 80's whether there was anything left to discover about cars. Then a science prof of mine planted a slightly different explanation; we have already made all the easy discoveries. From here on, advances would only happen through careful analysis of subtle, hard-to-interpret results. Math, especially statistics, was about to get a whole lot harder.

Alternative explanation.