On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:02:34 -0700 (PDT), RicodJour
wrote:

On Jul 10, 4:36*pm, wrote:
On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:35:19 GMT, John Forrest Tomlinson

Dear Carl. *Did I say you didn't or did I ask?

Please shut up now.

Dear John,

Were you ignorant or not?

Incidentally, have you caught up yet?

Or do you want to tell me to shut up again if I haven't put 7 more
pounds on my bike for your education?

Quit trying to hijack the thread. We're beating up on Scott at the
moment.

R

Dear RJ,

Okay, let's trade for a moment.

If a frame is steel, the odds are that less than 1% of it is carbon.

Poor Scott shouldn't quit his day job and head for Las Vegas.

("Hey, there are only two possibilities, either I win or I lose, so it
looks like a 50-50 proposition!")

Now you explain the odds to John about whether I added 7 pounds to my
top tube as he kept begging me to do and then posted the details with
photos on RBT.

***

Scott can take a little comfort in how tricky probability is.

Anyone beating up on him should look into the Monty Hall problem.

In "The Drunkard's Walk," Mlodinow quotes a Harvard professor whose
glum opinion was that "our brains are not wired to do probability
problems very well." (p. 45)

Later, Mlodinow quotes Martin Gardner, who said in a Scientific
American piece on a problem like the Monty Hall problem that 'in no
other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in
probability theory." (p. 56)

In his chapter on the Monty Hall problem, Mlodinow gives us this juicy
detail:

"When told of this [Vos Savant's solution _is_ correct], Paul Erdos,
one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century, said
'That's impossible.' Then, when presented with a formal mathematical
proof of the correct answer, he still didn't believe it and grew
angry. Only after a colleauge arranged for a computer simulation in
which Erdos watched hundreds of trials that came out 2 to 1 in favor
of switching [if the game show host opens one of two doors that you
didn't guess and asks whether you want to switch your original guess]
did Erdos concede that he was wrong." (p. 49)

The Monty Hall problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

Technically, I _know_ that Vos Savant was right and that there really
is a huge 2-to-1 advantage if I switch my guess when the game show
host opens one of the doors that I didn't choose and asks me if I want
to change my mind.

But like Erdos, I don't _believe_ it and it makes me angry.

(Not being a famous mathematician, I don't have to concede that this
is wrong.)

Cheers,

Carl Fogel