Re: [math-fun] Everyone's a winner!
Brent Meeker <meekerdb@verizon.net> wrote:
It may also be important to consider the range of competitors.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/04/16/302943533/the-ultimate-anim...
Very true. Of course animals can beat people at many tasks. For instance horses can run faster than people. (However, people can run *further* than horses.) What's surprising and disturbing about that story is that chimps are beating people at an intellectual task. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. For instance I've noticed that I seem to have no color memory. I remember colors only verbally, and only if I make a mental note of them. I'm also not a graphical thinker. I've been beaten at the pattern-matching game Jungle Speed by a small child. I've realized that I translate the patterns into words and compare those, which is slower than comparing patterns directly. I also do very poorly at the pattern-matching game Set, but I've discovered it has some interesting mathematical properties, as does Tsuro, another game I'm bad at. (I added several Tsuro- inspired sequences to OEIS.) As for what kind of contest I'd be best at, probably a trivia contest. I'd do very well in Jeopardy! if they'd get rid of the sports, potent potables, and recent popular culture categories. Especially if the questions are mostly about math, science, written science fiction, science fiction fandom, engineering, history, and geography. (I spend most of my free time reading, mostly non-fiction, and I retain what I read. I've read more words than I am seconds old.) Another kind of contest is by species rather than by individual. For instance how does the total distance walked by people compare to the total distance walked by ants? Of course nobody has kept careful track, but I'd estimate that people have walked a few hundred light years and that ants have walked a few hundred billion light years. (There are a lot more of them, and they've been around for a lot longer.) (Of course you could nitpick that ants aren't just one species, or that they crawl rather than walk.) A perhaps more interesting question is how the total distance people have walked compares to the distances we have bicycled, driven in cars, flown on airplanes, and flown in space. I like to collect unexpected numbers. For instance how would you guess the heat generated by the sun, per unit time per unit mass, compares to the metabolic heat generated by a person? Check it out for yourself, as you probably wouldn't believe my answer. Another example is that caves can't be more than a few miles deep on Earth, due to the pressure of the overlying rock, but that on a smaller planet they could be deeper, so the total lengths of caves could be much more. In the limit, caves could go all the way to the center of a small planet, and the total length of the caves on that small world could be measured in light years. (Hal Clement wrote a story about people getting lost in such a cave system.) I once took a free blood test at a health fair. They test 20 things. Anything that's in the top or bottom 5 percent of what healthy people typically score is flagged as abnormal. Some claim that it's a marketing scheme, since by chance most healthy people will score abnormal on at least one thing by that standard, and most of them will pay for followup tests. Sure enough, I scored abnormal on one thing: Cholesterol. It was flagged as too *low*. I didn't opt for any followup test. Given that that was nearly 30 years ago, and I haven't been ill for over 40 years, I'd say I made the right choice. (I'm uninsured. Friends call me the world's oldest "young invincible.") Speaking of misleading statistics, in May there was a thousand year flood in Ellicott City, Maryland, just two years after another thousand year flood in the same location. This is cited as proof of global climate change. I don't doubt global climate change, but that wasn't evidence for it. I happened to be in Baltimore that day, just ten miles from Ellicott City. There that storm was heavy, but it definitely wasn't the heaviest storm in a thousand years. More like the heaviest storm in a month. There was no storm damage in or near my hotel (unless you count a minor leak from the skylight) even though the hotel is just 14 feet above sea level, and the sea-level harbor is just across the street. The United States could be divided into about 38,000 squares ten miles on a side. So it can be expected that each year about 38 of them have a thousand-year flood. Floods, unlike volcanoes and earthquakes, don't relieve any long-term stress, so each year is an independent roll of the dice. The chances of any specific place that had a thousand-year flood having another within three years is about 1/333. So if there are 38 places that have a thousand-year flood each year, chances are about one in nine that at least one of them will have another thousand-year flood within three years (i.e. the same year, the following year, or, as in Ellicott City, two years later). So I'd expect such a repetition to happen more than once a decade somewhere in the US. The same reasoning applies independently to all other weather records, such as drought, snow, heat, cold, lightning, and wind. So what happened in Ellicott City is unfortunate, but it shouldn't be astonishing, nor is it evidence that the climate is collapsing and we are all doomed.
On 7/22/2018 9:33 PM, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
Brent Meeker <meekerdb@verizon.net> wrote:
It may also be important to consider the range of competitors. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/04/16/302943533/the-ultimate-anim... Very true. Of course animals can beat people at many tasks. For instance horses can run faster than people. (However, people can run *further* than horses.) What's surprising and disturbing about that story is that chimps are beating people at an intellectual task.
We all have our strengths and weaknesses. For instance I've noticed that I seem to have no color memory. I remember colors only verbally, and only if I make a mental note of them. I'm also not a graphical thinker. I've been beaten at the pattern-matching game Jungle Speed by a small child. I've realized that I translate the patterns into words and compare those, which is slower than comparing patterns directly. I also do very poorly at the pattern-matching game Set, but I've discovered it has some interesting mathematical properties, as does Tsuro, another game I'm bad at. (I added several Tsuro- inspired sequences to OEIS.)
As for what kind of contest I'd be best at, probably a trivia contest. I'd do very well in Jeopardy! if they'd get rid of the sports, potent potables, and recent popular culture categories. Especially if the questions are mostly about math, science, written science fiction, science fiction fandom, engineering, history, and geography. (I spend most of my free time reading, mostly non-fiction, and I retain what I read. I've read more words than I am seconds old.)
Another kind of contest is by species rather than by individual. For instance how does the total distance walked by people compare to the total distance walked by ants? Of course nobody has kept careful track, but I'd estimate that people have walked a few hundred light years and that ants have walked a few hundred billion light years. (There are a lot more of them, and they've been around for a lot longer.) (Of course you could nitpick that ants aren't just one species, or that they crawl rather than walk.) A perhaps more interesting question is how the total distance people have walked compares to the distances we have bicycled, driven in cars, flown on airplanes, and flown in space.
I like to collect unexpected numbers. For instance how would you guess the heat generated by the sun, per unit time per unit mass, compares to the metabolic heat generated by a person? Check it out for yourself, as you probably wouldn't believe my answer.
Being a physicists I already knew the answer. :-)
Another example is that caves can't be more than a few miles deep on Earth, due to the pressure of the overlying rock, but that on a smaller planet they could be deeper, so the total lengths of caves could be much more. In the limit, caves could go all the way to the center of a small planet, and the total length of the caves on that small world could be measured in light years. (Hal Clement wrote a story about people getting lost in such a cave system.)
I once took a free blood test at a health fair. They test 20 things. Anything that's in the top or bottom 5 percent of what healthy people typically score is flagged as abnormal. Some claim that it's a marketing scheme, since by chance most healthy people will score abnormal on at least one thing by that standard, and most of them will pay for followup tests. Sure enough, I scored abnormal on one thing: Cholesterol. It was flagged as too *low*. I didn't opt for any followup test. Given that that was nearly 30 years ago, and I haven't been ill for over 40 years, I'd say I made the right choice. (I'm uninsured. Friends call me the world's oldest "young invincible.")
Speaking of misleading statistics, in May there was a thousand year flood in Ellicott City, Maryland, just two years after another thousand year flood in the same location. This is cited as proof of global climate change. I don't doubt global climate change, but that wasn't evidence for it. I happened to be in Baltimore that day, just ten miles from Ellicott City. There that storm was heavy, but it definitely wasn't the heaviest storm in a thousand years. More like the heaviest storm in a month. There was no storm damage in or near my hotel (unless you count a minor leak from the skylight) even though the hotel is just 14 feet above sea level, and the sea-level harbor is just across the street.
Ten miles is plenty of distance for a big difference in rain fall. Didn't they nominate it a thousand year flood in Ellicott City based on measured rainfall? Was it the same as in Baltimore?
The United States could be divided into about 38,000 squares ten miles on a side. So it can be expected that each year about 38 of them have a thousand-year flood.
But in a lot of them a thousand year "flood" might be 6 inches of rain instead of the mean 2 inches. So however statistically unusual it was, it wouldn't get reported beyond the local newspaper and nobody would call it a flood. Brent
Floods, unlike volcanoes and earthquakes, don't relieve any long-term stress, so each year is an independent roll of the dice. The chances of any specific place that had a thousand-year flood having another within three years is about 1/333. So if there are 38 places that have a thousand-year flood each year, chances are about one in nine that at least one of them will have another thousand-year flood within three years (i.e. the same year, the following year, or, as in Ellicott City, two years later). So I'd expect such a repetition to happen more than once a decade somewhere in the US.
The same reasoning applies independently to all other weather records, such as drought, snow, heat, cold, lightning, and wind.
So what happened in Ellicott City is unfortunate, but it shouldn't be astonishing, nor is it evidence that the climate is collapsing and we are all doomed.
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participants (2)
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Brent Meeker -
Keith F. Lynch