Interesting Problem

Statisticians call this kind of decision making, sequential decision making.  You are forced to decide on the spot while you are still gathering data.

Assume that you desire to get married.  There are 100 eligible suitors.  You want the very best possible mate from this pool.  How do you go about finding the best possible mate?  Obviously you don't want to go through the trouble of dating all 100 of the suitors.  The rules of this particular game require that you can only go out with each person one time.  After that date you have to decide whether this is the one.  You can never date that person again if you reject them after that first date.  If you pick that one the game is over.  So if you choose the first person you will never get to know whether later dates might have been better.  If you reject too many those following may never equal the earlier suitors.

What is the best strategy for finding a mate under these circumstances?

Answer:  According to H.W. Lewis, a retired physics professor and the author of the excellent book "Why Flip a Coin" the best strategy is to patiently date and rate and wait through 36 prospective partners before selecting the next one who is better than one of the preceding suitors.

Veterans Day

Good wishes to all our Military Veterans, old and new.  Hopefully there will come a day when the world is safe enough so that they won’t be needed.  Their service and sacrifice should not be forgotten.

How Good Is Your Sense of Pitch?

You can find out by taking this cool tone deafness test from the National Institute on Deafness here. Being able to play many musical instruments by ear, I was not surprised to find out that I have an excellent sense of pitch. How did you do?

Useful Word

mumpsimus, adjective - A traditional notion that is obstinately held even though it is unreasonable.

Paying Attention

So there I was, meditatively doing military presses at the gym and pondering the eternal verities, when a woman I do not know approached me and asked me something. Not really paying attention and hoping she would go would go away, I said to her, “Ah … sure.”

I notice the she had a horrified expression on her face and I wonder what I had just assented to. So I buck up and ask what she might have said to me.

She replied, “Well I have been going from person to person today trying to raise money to promote literacy and I had asked you a question connected with that. It was, would you like to live in a world where everyone was illiterate? And you said, sure.”

Oops.

Two Concepts

Hobson's Choice - an apparently free choice that really offers no choice at all.  A famous example of this was Henry Ford's proclamation that you could buy a Model T Automobile in "any color so long as it's black."

This is contrasted with

Morton's Fork - which describes a choice between two equally unpleasant alternatives.  A famous example of this might be to be "thrown from the frying pan into the fire" or to be given the choice of how you wish to be executed.

Random Saturday Thoughts

• I’ve started reading an interesting historical novel, “Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, which is about Thomas Cromwell, chief Minister in the cabinet of Henry the VIII. It is quite good so far, intricate and thoughtful, and a must read if you are interested in that period of English History.
• I am headed to the Hawthorne Racetrack today to bet on some of the Breeder’s Cup races. Hopefully the fates will be kind to me.
• I have fallen into a truly bizarre sleep pattern the last couple of days. I ended up going to bed last night at 6 p.m. and waking at 1 a.m. This seems like a bad trend to me and no doubt is going to crush my social life.
• The year of bizarre weather continues here in Chicago as some forecasters are speculating that it might get close to 70 degrees here today!

Thought For The Day

"IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Charles Dickens, from a  "A Tale of Two Cities"

Amusing Joke

"One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign.  He said, "Didn't you see the stop sign."  I said, "Yeah, but I don't believe everything I read."

Steven Wright

Cool Math Trick

Multiplying with your fingers.  You can check it out here.

Angry Cat

I had to take Emma the Cat to the Vet yesterday. Upon seeing me remove the cat carrier from the closet (deluxe model, soft and comfy) she yelped and ran and hid under the bed. No amount of coaxing or cat treats could make her come out, so eventually the manual method which involved much Laoch bloodletting and pathetic cat distress sounds (help! help! help!) came into play.

Here is a snippet of our conversation:

Me: Would you like to go to the vet this morning?

Emma the cat: No, I will not go into the cat carrier. You can not make me.

Me: Don't you like the vet?

Emma the cat: No, do you like the proctologist?

Me: How about a cat treat?

Emma the cat: Yes, I would like a treat. No, you can not fool me by putting the treat into the cat carrier.

later

Me: That was not so bad was it?

Emma the cat: You sir, are a beast! I demand that you pet me and give me some food. I have missed hours of napping! Ok now that I have eaten I will hide under the bed for the rest of eternity. My new motto for you is the same way I feel about Barak Obama, “We won’t get fooled again.”

Me: I am sorry but it was for your own good.

Emma the cat: You are a lying dog.

Nothing like accurate character analysis from your cat.

Thought For The Day

“Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one’s belt buckled.”

Frederick Raphael

Query

Here is a good thought experiment that I found on the Entrepreneur Corner website:

If you had five dollars and two hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible?

Browsing Is Dangerous

So I was browsing through a local used bookstore yesterday, hoping against hope that I would not find anything to buy which might add to my ever growing book collection when alas, I spied this magical volume:

“How To Dominate Women,” by Gary Brodsky

It was only one dollar so how could I say no?  No doubt I will finish this impressive tome by morning and then all of women kind will be in trouble! I will be dominating left and right.  One imagines that the secrets contained in this powerful volume should have never been revealed to the general public. 

If you are reading this and you are female you should just go ahead and submit now.  Resistance is futile.

One Must Wonder

One must wonder after reading the article entitled, “Ex: A-Rod Had Portraits of Himself as Centaur Hanging Over His Bed,” what exactly Alex Rodriguez might be thinking? Did he wake up one morning and say, I wonder how I would look as a mythological figure? Or perhaps, chicks will love seeing the half centaur, half Alex, figure above my bed as I am ravaging them? If he gets married will there be a half centaur portrait of his bride added to the bedside? Does a new male or female conquest enter the bedroom and see the centaur figure and respond favorably? Carl Jung thought the centaur was a symbol of animal instinct or libido so perhaps Alex has read Jung and is using this as a bizarre aphrodisiac?

Thought For The Day

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Richard P. Feynman

Interesting Information About Online Dating Efficacy

Here is an interesting article about how people are gaming online dating sites in order to make them work more efficiently for them.

Interesting Thought Experiment

In James Surowiecki's  book, "The Wisdom of Crowds,"  the author describes an interesting thought experiment.  Originally it was formulated by a social scientist named Thomas C. Schelling, for a class of law students who were at Yale in New Haven Connecticut.  The question was formulated as follows:

"You have to meet someone in New York City. You don't know where you are supposed to meet, and there's no way to talk the person ahead of time.  Where do you go?"

In that experiment a majority of the students chose the information desk at Grand Central Station (this experiment was done in the early 1960s).  How were so many people able to come to a similar answer?  Schelling theorized that there were " 'focal points' upon which people's expectations would converge."  This tends to show that people can find their way to results which favor them as a whole without central direction or even without communicating with each other.  In part this is because people experience the world similarly especially if they are from a culturally similar place.

My question then is, for your own city or town, what place would you choose?

For Chicago, I think I would choose the Sears Tower (recently renamed the Willis Tower, ugh), since it is the tallest most recognizable building and is a magnet to tourists.  Another good choice might be Union Station, a train station in the loop which gets many visitors from out of town through Amtrak and Metra.  This is a complicated problem because you have to try and put yourself into the shoes of the other person who has the same thing in their mind.  So you must balance ideas of what would seem an attractive meeting place with thoughts about what they think you might be thinking.

So what place would you choose in your area and why?

Interesting Word

ultracrepidarian, noun - a person who gives opinions beyond the scope of his or her knowledge.

Retro Libation

In the first James Bond book, Casino Royale (1953), chapter 7, Ian Fleming wrote:

"A dry martini," he said. "One. In a deep champagne goblet."

"Oui, monsieur."

"Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?"