Search Strings
So, according to my website stats, these fine search engine strings have been used (among others) in the month of October to find my site:
everything is gay
bastard
academia sucks
Not much terribly interesting for November, except maybe "xray apendicitis" [sic], which is rather odd.
I am amused.
Trojan Using Sony DRM Rootkit Spotted
Most interesting Slashdot response I’ve ever seen
Upcoming Travel
I'm doing a bit more travelling before the year ends.
This Saturday (12 Nov), I'm leaving for Berlin for an Intel thing. I'll be there until the next Saturday morning. I should hopefully have a fair amount of time to do some sightseeing, and I'll be able to see Jens and Moritz while I'm there. Awesome. Malte, from our Munich office should be joining me for a couple days, which will be cool.
In December, I'm going back to the east coast for Christmas and New Year's. Amazingly, I managed to get a free flight with all the miles I've racked up with United this past year. I really thought that entire time period would be blacked out, but I managed to get a flight out on the 24th, and one back on the 4th. Not ideal, but it's free, so I'll take it. I'll probably be up in NYC for a day or two around the 28th or 29th, so if you're in the area, drop me a line. Otherwise I'll be in MD.
Joe Blow can, well, blow me
Well said. This is basically what I want to tell people when they say "Linux needs this", or "OSS needs this", or "your application needs this" if I want more people/average users/my grandmother to be able to use it. The bottom line is: I don't care if these people use Linux. And I certainly don't want them using Linux if getting them to do so means being forced to make stability and security compromises (among other things).
Some Press…
Aww, so we're GNOME's "beloved little brother"? That's so cute.
Sulu
Huh, it seems that George Takei (aka Star Trek's Hikaru Sulu), is gay. Never woulda guessed.
I feel like something of a jackass blogging about this, but hey, why not.
Re: Monty Hall
Erik, I presume what you call the Monty Hall problem is in summary this:
- You’re in a game and you have to choose one of three doors behind which there may be a prize (apparently in this case a donkey, hmm, maybe not a prize then ;-)
- After you have chosen a door, the game show host opens one of the other doors behind which there is no prize.
- You get the chance to change your choice of doors.
The correct answer is that you should switch your choice without thinking, because it doubles your chance to get the prize. Is this the problem we are talking about?
Most people will intuitively feel that there is now a new situation where you have a 50% chance of getting the prize, because there are two doors left and one of them has the prize.
The reason this is not the case is in rule number 2 above. The important part is that the host chooses one of the other doors and never the door you have chosen. Now, this gives you two possibilities:
- You initially chose a door with the prize: (33% chance) -> This is easy for the game show host, he can chose any of the other doors. The other door has 0% chance to contain the prize. Switching will give you the wrong door.
- You initially chose a door with no prize (66% chance) -> The game show host has no choice. He has to choose the remaining empty door. Now this is interesting. The other door has 100% chance of containing the prize. Switching will give you the right door.
See, because the chance to choose a room with no prize initially is twice as high, you have a bigger chance that the game show host is forced to open the other empty room, which gives a bigger chance for the third room to contain the prize.
Does that help? Or were you talking about something else entirely? ;-)
Update:
Maybe this is a better summary:
If you choose right the first time, switching will never give you the prize. If you choose wrong the first time, switching will always give you the prize. There’s a much bigger chance you choose wrong (2 out of 3).
Monty Hall
Perhaps a real mathematician can help me here. I just don’t understand the supposed solution to the Monty Hall problem.
I understand the reasons that it is supposed “unintuitive” but I still believe them. Allow me to forumlate the objection in a way that seems novel.
Once Monty reveals the Donkey, and you are given what is in reality a new problem – pick a door with a 50% probablity of any one being the right one. The thing is that switching from your originally selected door doesn’t change the probability of the door being the right one. Merely the act of revealing the donkey behind one of the unselected doors does.
So what’s critical is selecting a door under these new odds – which is exactly what Monty is letting you door. The key for me is that even choosing to keep the door you already have is a selection.
What am I missing?
Flock
Here is what’s cool about this blog post – I’m doing it all with flock.
I think I may do a little review of this new still pre alpha browser. When I first heard of it I was very dubious about it. But after only five minutes of use, I “get” it. Flock may not be the browser for me, even when completed, but I understand the Flock philosophy now, and understand why it’s developers seem so excited.
At heart, Flock seems to be gunning for making the read/write web we were all so excited about 10 years ago but didn’t get. It’s tactic is that sites like del.icio.us and tools like weblogs are effectively adding the write/share features of the old Web vision on top of the current read/display web that we’ve got – so why not make a browser that combines all those things transparently. For example, when I say that I’m blogging this with Flock, I don’t mean that I surfed to the WordPress login with Flock, I mean that I used Flocks built in blogging tool to write this blog – Flock autodetected how to connect to the XML-RPC service that WordPress provides, and is making this post for me. All I needed to do point it at blog.xfce.org and enter my information.