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.