Submitted by Jeremy C.
Now This is a superpower!
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So, if you know anything about me - or if you read my stumbleupon blog (no longer on stumbleupon - don’t get me started about that mess of a site) you know that anything Cthulhu is sheer greatness (the stumbleupon blog can be found at http://coolthingsinterestingthings.wordpress.com/ - you can search for the old ones in it to see more Cthulhu greatness). So while this is not science, and probably damages neurons by watching it, I bring you the Narwhal Song!
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» More evidence in the decline of American education...
So this article has appeared for a couple of days on Yahoo. It quotes Richard Lustig who has gross winnings playing the lottery of about $1M (note that we do not know his net - how much has he lost trying to win?). Richard is not, well, mathematically the shiniest ball in the lottery cage.
“Tip 1: Pick your own numbers - do not leave it up to the machine.” OK, the game - if working properly - randomly distributes 6 balls into the winning combination. It does not matter which numbers you pick or the machine picks. Any set of six numbers has the same probability of winning in any play of the game. It is nonsensical to think that “your” numbers are in any way superior to the “computer’s” numbers.
“Tip 2: Do your homework and pick numbers that have never come up before.” So Richard must really stink at craps. This is quite possibly the most inane thing I have heard all week (and I spend a lot of time with 8th graders and college freshmen). That is like saying you should pick tails if the last toss of the coin was heads. Each event is independent from all others. Any three sequences of numbers are equally likely to occur. This means it is just as likely to get three exactly the same winning combinations as it is to get any three combinations that Richard picked. If you win, you might as well just stick with the winning numbers if you are going to play again as they are as likely to be picked again as any other set.
“3. Stick to your strategy. You have to learn what number to play and how often to play.” Commit to your numbers and stick to your strategy. - This is just mind numbing rubbish. Nothing here has any basis on probability at all. Just some sort of superstition.
“4. Avoid lottery fever. When jackpots get this high , Lustig says, people tend to get lottery fever and spend a lot more than they normally would or can afford. Don’t go crazy; the odds are still the same no matter how much you spend.”
While Richard almost gets something right here I am not sure he actually understands. Yes when the lottery is large you have the same odds of winning as when the pot is small but if you buy two tickets you double your probability. Of course you double a very very very small number. So the more numbers you play the higher the probability of winning. It is just that this increase is vanishingly small.
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Science geek art.
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Some aeronautical goofiness for a Friday. An 800 pound paper airplane was launched by helicopter in Arizona. The paperclip used to add weight to the nose was 5 feet long.
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OK, so now that I started on Disney World I thought I would touch on a cool feature that the designers use in the parks - Forced Perspective. When you walk down Main Street the buildings rise up one or two stories above you, or so it would seem. Actually they are foreshortened which gives the appearance of height without actually being that tall. The castle in each park also uses this technique to make it seem taller than it is.
On a side note - Main Street might appear slightly familiar those of us living in Fort Collins. Harper Goff, a noted Disney art director, helped design Main Street and in an interview says that he showed Walt Disney photos of Fort Collins and that the imagery was incorporated into the design of Main Street.
Another use of forced perspective are the Potemkin Stairs in Odessa:
The stairs appear longer than they are because the width of the stairs narrows the farther up they are. These stairs are, of course, famous from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece, The Battleship Potemkin (which I watched years ago recuperating from a surgery). The powerful scene of the Czarists opening fire on civilians on the stairs and a baby carriage bouncing down the steps is one of the most memorable scenes in the movies. Never mind there is little to no evidence that the Czar’s troops actually massacred anyone on the stairs - never let details of history get in the way of a great shot.
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» Roller Coaster Science
Just got back from a Spring Break trip to Disney World. The kids are now old enough to ride everything and yet young enough to require me to ride with them. Thought I would put up something about roller coasters. The animated graphic is a nice way to show the energy in roller coasters.
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The smallest chameleon ever found, Brookesia micra, has been discovered on a tiny island off Madagascar. Islands can be a source of either giants or diminutive versions of organisms found on the mainlands (including dwarf elephants and humans).
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» But am I four friends away from Kevin Bacon?
So a new study from the University of Milan (found here ) shows that of the 720+ million Facebook users, the links by “friends” of any two people are on average 4.74. That is, you are a friend of a friend of a friend of friend of just about anyone else on Facebook.
This is shorter than the famous “Six degrees of separation” that Stanley Milgram determined back in the 1960s. But, as has been pointed out, the notion of “friend” on facebook is a tenuous one. Many younger people maintain friend lists in the several hundreds. Of course, these far exceed Dunbar’s number, 150, which is the theoretical cognative limit as to the maximum number of stable social relationships that we can have. Click the monkey to read a humorous explanation of Dunbar’s number:
So I have an Erdos number of 5, and an infinite Bacon number, but I can find a path of 4 to someone in Bhutan. But are any of the links really friendly?
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Reason #126 for becoming a biologist: Murmuration of Starlings. The complex dynamics of the flocks of starlings are called murmurations. Recently insight into the dynamics has come from statistical physics and “critical transitions.” The dynamics of criticality occur in grasshopper outbreaks, earthquakes and forest fires (all with different structures than flocking birds). The video is an amazing look at nature.
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