Cute girl dressed in a superhero outfit, standing on the roof of a building with a backdrop of canals near 浜松町 (I think). What more could you possibly want?
Archive for January, 2009
Desktop Picture of the week
Saturday, January 24th, 2009Kidnapped on fasbok
Saturday, January 17th, 2009Hot on the heels of being cyber raped on fasbok comes this case of a fake kidnapping on the popular book of faces:
My Facebook account was hacked approximately 40hrs ago. I discovered this when I was called by a concerned friend who wanted to confirm that I was being held at gunpoint in London and desperately needed him to wire me cash (via Western Union) so I could escape the country and return to Australia. Of course, I was not in London, and it was not me he was chatting to on Facebook.
Interesting phenomenon. Obviously there needs to be some kind of emergency override for situations like this…
How do I make myself do stuff?
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009For my younger friends who en masse seem to be having a huge crisis about what the hell to do and how the hell to do it, let me collect a few resources. This list will develop.
① Metafilter: How can I make myself do stuff?
Freedom means you’re not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you’re supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and it’s not really what you want to do. It could take months, if you’re lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.
② Paul Graham: Essays (most are good but this is a good start)
The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it’s too obvious to your brain that you’re not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you’ve become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.
Porn porn porn
Saturday, January 10th, 2009Apparently this blog is now blocked on a common content filter for its “porn”:
according to the barracuda web filter here at work, i am now denied access to your website because it falls into the category “porn”.
Well, shit. I hate to disappoint. All those surfers coming here expecting porn .. and I don’t deliver. Maybe I should start!
Well, that was a lame MacWorld
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009I knew it would be bad as soon as news broke that La Steve would not be presenting. It was.
Let’s sum up:
New 17″ Macbook Pro – looks nice, but it was hardly unexpected for Apple to extend recent form factor revisions to the larger model. That battery life is very tempting if it holds up to scrutiny, although I’m of mixed feelings about the fact that it’s built-in. *Probably* a good thing, since I never carry two batteries anyway and even keeping another one charged and ready is a hassle.
iWork ‘09 – routine update to Apple’s decent office suite. I am sure it is better, but it’s pretty hard to get excited about an office suite.
iLife ‘09 – routine update with new features. Pretty good, I guess. The automatic video stabilisation in iMovie sounds interesting, if it works. Also, geotagging in iPhoto. Unfortunately, I tend to think that what iLife really needs is to be made faster. All this extra bloat can’t help its speed.
…
And that’s it. I know it was pre-arranged, but one can’t help but think these meagre announcements could have been made at a smaller event, or even just announced on the website.
And I am not very encouraged by the lack of Mac updates. A quick check of MacRumors’ Buyer’s Guide shows that both the Mac Pro and XServe have not been updated for a whole year. The Mac Mini is even worse, at over a year and a half with no update whatsoever. And the Cinema Display monitor range tops them all with an astonishing 643 days since they were last updated. Many *cars* have an update cycle faster than that.
Let’s hope the overdue tsunami of Mac desktop updates hits the shore soon, lest “iPhone will ruin Mac” pessimists start to look accurate in their predictions of a long slow decline for my favourite computing platform.
Twitter phishing using TinyURL
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009In April, 2008 I posted about how TinyURL is a very bad idea. One of my reasons for it being a bad idea:
If you don’t give the proper URL, I can’t tell:
- Whether it’s a link to some likely spam/other hostile site
The phishing scam seen on Twitter is exactly this – sending people obfuscated URLs then hoping they don’t notice the actual domain when they open them. Working, too.
Quote of the day
Monday, January 5th, 2009From The Skeptic’s Guide:
McCarthy decided that her son Evan’s autism was caused by vaccines – because she had heard the rumors and her “mommy instinct” told her it was right. She then confirmed her beliefs by attending Google University’s confirmation bias program.
Aha. That’s a very popular course.
Song Similarities, part n
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009Finally realised which song Sabali, by Amadou & Mariam off their album Welcome to Mali reminded me of. It’s Solex (Close to the Edge) by Michael Woods, off Ministry of Sound 2004.
Guess it’s not all that similar .. but it was driving me nuts until I finally remembered the other song…
My review of Metacritic’s 2008 top albums
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009I present my review of MetaCritic’s Best Albums of 2008.
(more…)
Kookaburra
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009A kookaburra decided to sit on my balcony, so I was trying to feed it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very interested in cheese and bread, and I didn’t have any non-frozen meat, so coming to me for food must have been a disappointment. Ah well ..
No Junk Mail Please
Friday, January 2nd, 2009From a house near my apartment.
Unfortunately, being the bastard that I am, if I was the postman I’d make certain this house received a special extra helping of junk mail.
Probability Paradoxes
Friday, January 2nd, 2009A recent post on Coding Horror about the nature of probability paradoxes struck a chord with me; I’ve always been fascinated by probability and its counterintuitive nature. Even though I rationally understand such concepts, I really do find it hard to “internalise” the thing. I thought I’d write about it to try and explain how to understand the problem.
The paradox in question is the Boy/Girl problem, which wikipedia has an explanation to here. However, I don’t like the Wikipedia explanation either. I will try to do better.
The question is:
“A family has two children. You know that (at least) one of the children is a boy. What is the probability that the other child is a girl?”.
The kneejerk response to this is “50%”. This is completely understandable and comes from a lifetime of learning that “chance has no memory”. The chance of a child being a boy or a girl is 50%, right? So how does knowing the sex of one of the children possibly affect the sex of the other?
The answer is that you have to consider the whole range of outcomes, you have to consider the results of the two childbirth events as a whole. The fact is, there are two children, with two possibilities each, so the range of possible outcomes looks like this:
BB BG GB GG
Where B and G mean boy and girl, obviously. Each of these four outcomes has equal probability.
However, since you have been told that one of the children is a boy, you are forced to remove one of the outcomes, leaving you with:
BB BG GB
See it? Since you know for sure that there are not two girls, there are only three possibilities left. In two of those three possibilities, the other child is a girl. So the chance of the other child being a girl is actually two thirds – 66.67%.
That is counterintuitive enough, but is fairly understandable when explained. Where it really gets freaky is when you introduce order. This is where my brain absolutely chokes and I have real difficulty accepting at an intuitive level the implications of having this extra information.
Let’s ask the question again, with information about the order:
“A family has two children. You know that the eldest child is a boy. What is the probability that the other child is a girl?”.
Sounds the same, right? My intuitive soul practically screams that the outcome should be the same. But it’s not.
Let’s look at the total range of possible outcomes again.
BB BG GB GG
We know the eldest child is a boy. Now we have to remove not one, but TWO, possible outcomes:
BB GB
In other words, the probability of the other child being a girl is back to 50%.
This seems utterly insane. How the fucking hell could knowing the order of birth influence probability in this way? After all, they have to be either younger or older, didn’t they? One or the other – it’s assumed! How can this change anything?
Well, the thing to understand here is that we’re not talking about two events any more. We’ve actually removed one of the events, so don’t need to consider four possible outcomes, of which one has been removed. We’ve considering one event with two possible outcomes – 50%.
In order to understand it more, let’s actually switch analogies to tossing a coin. We’re not used to thinking about order in relation to children, but in coin-tossing it is natural. When it comes down to it, though, it’s all the same thing. Let’s re-ask the questions – in terms of coin tosses.
Question: A coin was tossed twice. At least once, it came up heads. What’s the chance it came up tails the other time?
Outcomes: HH HT TH TT
Eliminate: TT
Remainder: HH HT TH
Answer: Two out of three times, ie. 66.67%
And now, let’s introduce our knowledge of the order:
Question: A coin was tossed twice, and came up heads the second time. What’s the chance it came up tails the first time?
Outcomes: HH HT TH TT
Eliminate: HT TT
Remainder: HH TH
Answer: 50%
Suddenly our knowledge of the order seems valuable. We’ve been given more information, and as a result the probability question is far more specific and back in line with the “independent event” intuitive expectations we had in the first place. By knowing everything about one of the events, we remove it from the equation.
Understanding how knowing the order influences probability has powerful ramifications. For example, we can now understand why the “statistical” result of 66.67% for the first “other child” example above doesn’t square with our intuitive expectation of 50%. When we first consider the problem, we can’t separate things out and are thinking in terms of “if the family has one boy, and another child is born, then that child has 50% chance of being either sex”. But see? That’s because we removed the event! If we don’t know the order, it’s back to 66.67%.
To me, rephrasing the question in terms of coins produces an “a-ha” moment in which I can intuitively grasp why the probability has suddenly “changed”. I hope the explanation works equally well for you.