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.

Final Blog post for Q2 reading

In the final blog for the outside reading book "A Few Kind Words and A Loaded Gun" i will be analyzing pages 390-end. Smith Just found out that his son was hung by an unknown group of people and is completly overwhelmed. He blames himself for the death but later realizes that it wasn't his fault and that he is going to try to get back at whoever did it, " I may not have killed him but i will kill whoever did" (Smith 403). This insight to smith's connection to a son he bearly knew shows readers that he is still loyal to his family. This raises my personal level of respect for him because if he still has some of the values he started with he might be able to recover the other ones. Later after he gets off of his sentence a little early for good behavior, (which he didn't think he would get), he trys to make a living writing. However he can only make a gew quid that way so he has to become a street sweeper. He soon gets tired of this job and started doing the occansional job to get some money. Whith this half-crime half-normal life we see a little improvement in smith's character but later it falls apart. He gets some old friends together and they form a professional robberry firm. The "Flying Sqaud" (Bank robber police specialist) soon start to trace the firm's actions and nickname them the laughing bank robbers because on christmas they robbed a bank with santa hats and wished the tellers a merry christmas.
Now smith's thoughts return to his old age (40ish) and his lack of enjoyment from robbing. He realizes again that robbery isn't his game anymore and quits. He manages to get a job brick laying from his brother-in-law and is able to live off of that. However when brick laying isn't needed he does the odd smash and grab to get by. One day when he was getting ready to leave for some laying a bunch of black sedans and a van pulled up in his drive way. Natural instinct told him to speed away and that is exactly what he did. He managed to get the "flying Sqaud" in a high speed pursuit for fifteen minutes but then he is cornered and he is forced out of his car. A dozen armed officers surround him and give him the usual talk smith instantly responds ""#*$& YOU!" on cue as if i were an actor, to old to play the part" (smith 445). Smith finally understands that his life was wasted and now he is to old to do what he should've done, be a father. The book ends with a chapter called regrets and tells readers how he would've lived his life differently. Razor Smith is currently serving a life sentence in the london prison system, where he writes books and columns.

Citation- on prior blogs

Blog post #5 for Q2 outside reading

In this Blog i will be summarizing and anaylzing "A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun" pages 263-390. In the begining of this section Smith was released from prison again and is starting to go into the "heavy" again. He starts off by joining an armed robbery firm, named the little firm. Their jobs consist of hits on grocery stores and the occansional bank. We can see that Smith is comfortable with this because he has a significant amount of money and he can live with his family. He doesn't get into drugs like many of his friends but instead craves the thrill of holding a gun to the cashier, " I never got hooked on skunk, i guess because my fix was the thrill of robbing" (smith 310). Smith clearly knows that he does burgalery not because he has to but because he enjoys the life it produces in him. Smith and the firm do odd jobs and on one of their jobs they were hitting a grocery store and wearing the employees clothing. when the silent alarm hit and they ran away a cashier tried to follow them thinking that they were actual employees. when they turned around and opened fire on him the cashier quickly realizes that they are not real employees. The fact that the little firm opened up on him also depicts the image that smith and his activities have lost the innocence that they once had. Later in the story he gets involved as "muscle" the leader of the little firm, terry. He gets involved in a gunshoot out and is forced to use his gun for the first time against a person. These actions compiled with an assortment of others tell readers that Smith is officialy a man lost in the fires of crime. However later in this segment he is jailed for his activities and sent to the standard crime center. He wittnesses 7 men attempt a mass escape. They try to steal a steam roller and burst out. They manage to get the roller however they do not know how to operate it and are stranded and recieve a brutal beating.
Right after Smith sees this he attempts to try to start a riot and goes after one of the gaurds, but no-one follows him and the screws get their way with him. When he is put into solitary he is unsure whether he will survive the beating because others like him have died from beatings like the one he is recieving. When he is left in the room he feels dead, but he manages to hang on. He recovers from his wounds while in solitary but he starts to think about his life more carefully. He realizes that crime is not the way to go and his whole life has been wasted by simple addictions, "If i could go back and redo my whole life i would have choosen to enter the proffesion of literature" (347). This is the major turning point in smith's moral choices and after being released from solitary he starts a prison newspaper and gets a weekly column in a london paper, (which he writes while in jail). Shortly afterwards the prison he is at gets a new governor and the old one is promoted. The new governor shuts down smith's paper but cannot stop him from writing his columns, (by now he has recieved a hodgepodge of jobs). Then devastating news comes, his son was hanged by unknown culprits.

Blog post #5 for Q2 outside reading

fourth outside reading post

In this blog i will be anaylzing and summarizing the novel "A few Kind Words and A Loaded Gun" by "Razor" Smith, pages 185-262. In this section Razor gets off from his three year sentence and gets back on the gang scene. When he first gets out he thinks to himself, " I was a bundle of spite and visciousness clothed in a teenage boy, a war, looking for a place to declare itself" (smith 208). By saying this Smith tells the readers that he is angry with the system but is willing to take out his anger on anyone who crosses him or looks at him incorrectly. We can look back at his beginnings and start to realize that he is no longer a man of morality but a man of anger and rage. This change came from the constant abuse of the prison management and the lack of encouraging role models in his life. Smith then goes to his part of south london and organizes a gang called the Balham wildkatz. He makes plans to take his group to the top and fight the "skin heads". While doing this his crew goes around doing random smash + grabs, and assorted crimes to get money for drugs, alchohal, and style. This is also a serious change in Smith's character from before. He commits crimes not only to stay alive but to have fun and to make life easier. From our viewpoint we can tell that smith is slipping ethically and probably will continue to slip. Later in this section he has a run in with a rival gang member and promises to have a straight fight, he commences the fight and it is fairly even until some of Smith's friends join in and start to beat on his adversary. When Smith finaly pulls them off he gets verbal abuse from the adversary. This abuse causes Smith to run up and kick the other guy in the face with his steel toed boots. We can clearly see that Smith's anger dominants his actions and controls who he is. Finally we see a faint glimmer of the old smith when he is watching another "straight" fight between to guys. When he sees another guy try to intervene with a weapon smith attacks the guy for the sake of the two fighters.
In the second half of this section smith is captured by his age old enemy, the police. He gets out shortly and is seeing a girl named allison. When he finds out that own of his best friends was having a go at her while he was in jail he gets infuriated and starts a fight. Both of them fight for 15 minutes and then get to tired to even throw another punch. To put an end to the battle a bouncer jumped in and declared the fight a draw. We can see the pride and honor that Smith still retains from before.After this gang violence escalates and Smith is nicked for GBH and wielding a dangerous weapon, the razor blade. He is now in an adult jail getting his first real taste of adult jail.

Citation on previous posts

Third outside reading post

In this blog i will be summarizing and anaylzing pages 134-184. To open up "Razor" and his friends in his current cell area are terrorizing the nounces and the sex offenders. This abuse gets to the point that they aren't allowed out of their cells while the nounces and offenders are out. In a few weeks "Razor' and Jel both get transfered to the Borstal system. The Borstal system is reservered for the hardest of Under-age delequents. He is seperated from his known buds and has only one real ally who slips him a blade the moment he gets there. Withen the first couple of hours he tangles with the wrong people and is sneak attacked during social time. The first blow almost knocks him out but he manages to hold his own then using his devoloped fighting skills he whips out his blade and cuts his assailant's hand open. He continues pressing the attack and slices his foe across the stomache. After this his attacker tries to flee and drops his weapon but "Razor" grabs him by the hair and is about to slice his neck open when he is tackled by "15 stone" screws. When he is taken away he yells, "Next time i'll fucking kill ya!" (143). I think that Smith at first is completly justified in defending himself with a blade but as he gets more into the battle he continues the assault just for enjoyment and an increase in reputation. In this section of the book you can clearly see the difference between the beginning Smith and were he is now.
In the second half of this section Smith is taking to the punishment block and meets the first nice screw he has ever met. The Screw's name is Mr. Black and offers Smith a ciggerate. Smith cleverly relates this to the time when the germans and british came out of their trenches and played football on december 25th. Smith finally realizes that not all management and powers are abusive, however this has no lasting effect on him. After his chapter at Rochester Borstal he is sent to a prison hospital. Upon is arrival he is beaten sensless and a "doctor" comes to him with a medication to help with the pain. He doesn't have any choice but to take the medicine and becomes mentally impaired. He is taken to his cell where he sits like a vegatable realizing what is happening but helpless to stop. He manages to stop drinking his tainted water but the gaurds notice and force him to drink it. With this comes an unreleaseable rage that builds up. Speaking ethically the doctor is extremly corrupt because he is destroying lives that still have potential, and enjoying it.

Citation- on original post