q3 blog post number 2

In the second analyzation/summarization of the book, The Drunkard's Walk, i will be analyzing and summarizing pages 60- 104. Mlodinow starts off by picking up where he left off in history, the next man to work on probability. (the first man was discussed in the original blog). This man was Blaise Pascal. He was a genius, his most famous work was the pascal's triangle. The concept of the triangle was actually created earlier by a chinese man and later discussed by Cardano, but Pascal managed to arrange it in a nifty format for which we give him all the credit. Later in Pascal's life he had a drastic 2 hour experince in which god talked to him. After this encounter he changed his life by giving up the corrupt logic and became a good christian. However in his last work, Pensees, he gave the rational reason for believing in god, "suppose you conced that you don't know wheter or not god exists and therefore assign a fifty percent probability to either proposistion. How should oyu weigh these odds when deciding whether to lead a pious life? If you act piously and God exisxts, Pascal argued, your gain- eternal happiness- is infinite. If on the other hand, God does not exsist, your loss is small, the sacrifice of piety" (76). By selling all of his secular items Pascal shows the world that he has truly become a devout man. However his greatest contribution to religion was not through his piety but rather his intelligence. Had he completly given up on rationality (like he said he did) he would've never been able to come up with such a complete answer to the religious question.
After Pascal's death the study of probability fell into the hands of simon newcomb, tha man who discovered benford's law. But before we delve into that subject i would like to talk about a fact that Mlodinow cleverly points out. Everytime there is a lottery there is one winner and by studying traffic patterns and accident rates approximatly one "loser" (person who dies)!! this is an insane fact, so you have the same chances of winning the lottery as dying when going to buy your ticket... kinda sad. Another crazy story that Mlodinow brings up is the story of the lottery losing. A group of australian realized that the virginia state lottery was offering a 27.9 million dollars in prizes with only 7.06 million combinations. So they bought all the combinations and made a nice profit, the moral of the story is that if you are talanted enough at statistics you can make easy money. Benford's law which was proven by Simon Newcomb states that in certain sequences lower numbers have a higher probability of showing up. The probability that the first number is a one is about 30 percent, a 2 is about 18 percent, and so on and so forth. it is easier to think of it this way, in a book the lower the page number the more likely that the page is more used. The farther you get from the front of the book the less used the pages look. This principle is applied everyday to test for fraudelence in the bussiness world.

Q3 post one

In this blog post i will be summarizing and analyzing the Drunkard's Walk How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, pages 1-60. Mlodinow starts readers off by telling them about a man who won a huge sum of money by thinking that 7 multiplied by 7 was 48. And then continues on in saying how everyone makes mistakes like that but they are most of the time less noticable, even though they are just as significant. In the first few chapters Mlodinow clearly spells out the basic laws of probability and points out in numerous occasions that human logic is completly flawed when it comes to probability. One example constitutes a CEO working in hollywood. For the first 5 years she managed to pull her filming company up and was paid hansomly for doing so, but on her sixth year she didn't manage to well. Because of that she was fired. However Mlodinow shows us through probability her dissapointing sixth year was just unlucky. Her first five years were above average and due to statistics, Lansing (the director/CEO) would have to equal out to her mean. Another more common example is when a person does good and they get rewarded or a person does bad and get punished. Usually the next day the person who did good does worse and the person who got punished does better. This is because when the person did exceptionally well or bad they are far away from their average and naturally they are going to get closer, so the reward/punishment doesn't really effect their behavor positivly or negativly.
In the final chapter Moldinow attempts to explain the most random phenominom ever. Imagine this you have 3 doors and one has a car behind it and the others have nothing. You pick a door and a person reveals that one of the doors you didn't pick has nothing behind it, is it in your best interest to switch or stay with the original door? It is always in your interest to switch. For this problem you must consider all possible out comes. THere are 2 outcomes, in one scenario you chose the lucky door one your first try, 1/3 chance. In the other scenario you didn't choose the lucky door, 2/3 scenario and a person reveals that all of the other non-car doors. It is kinda hard to explain but i will do my best. It is much easier to explain if there are 100 doors, and only one has a car behind it. lucky guess scenario is 1/100 and the other scenario (where all the doors are open except 2, the one you have chosen and the one the person doesn't open), is 99/100 where you don't choose the lucky door and now you are presented with 1 other door. The reason for this is because the person opening the doors de-randomizes the game. He does this because he will never reveal the door with the car behind it. When this was first published in a journal by a very intelligent women, almost all professors on statistics were outraged at her and told her that she was incorrect and crazy. Later she proved this mathematicaly and some still didn't believe her. Mlodinow finishes this chapter by talking about the father of statistics, Geralamo Cardano. He was an italian doctor who was very poor during the middle ages and his father was killed by his brother in the inquisition. However he managed to reach fame and fortune by saving money through gambling, (he would only gamble when in his favor, and he knew probability well enough to make money). Then he became a wealthy physician, but later in life lost his fortune because of a scandal involving his son. His work on statistics wasn't earthshaking due to the lack of math symbols, but he is recognized because he was the first one to do any work with statistics.