The Monty Hall problem is hard enough to confound lots of smart people and lots of professional mathematicians and probability experts. Now imagine two corollary problems. My initial reaction is to say that neither will affect the optimal action. But if the Monty Hall problem has tought us anything, it’s that intuition is usually wrong, and rational thought is almost always more wrong.
I contribute to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia on almost a daily basis. I’ve written articles on Danbury and the Danbury Fair almost from scratch, and rewritten several articles, like Handheld game console. Check out my User page for more contributions.
With Moveable Type, several freely available plugins, and a fair amount of HTML and CSS knowledge, I’ve been able to create a website with three totally independent sections, each behaving differently and managed independently. I’m fairly proud of how this website has turned out.
The Hundred Thousand Gallon Restaurant, from the infinite depths of the Halfbakery. Try the top ten, they’re delicious.
You’d think this would be easy. Sadly, 10-digit numbers don’t fit in 32 bits. I’ll let you know when I’ve solved it.
Interesting fact #1: Doom 3 for PC has gone gold. Release date is August 5. “More remains to be done for the OSX version … and that will take some time.” Sorry. Oh, and there will be a demo.
Interesting fact #2: Half-Life 2 specs have been revealed. Sadly, my desktop is still 50% slower than the minimum, but I’m planning on finally upgrading for these two games. “Late summer release”?
Interesting fact #3: I need to add Eurogamer to my daily reading.
Penny Arcade Remix Project. A little old, but still funny.
Achewood gets a book deal. I’m so fricken excited.
My parents are enlarging their bedroom and bathroom by about 50%. Being nerds, they’ve set up a ConstructionCam so we all can watch.
Gmail Agent API, plus a lot of great details on URLs and how the Javascript works.
Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies. Simply incredible. I recommend the 12 Monkeys article in particular.
Right now marks the official launch of the new Plutor.org site. Powered by Moveable Type 3.0 and a mess of plugins, I hope to keep this place updated now. I’ve got my own sorta-blog, but the focus of this site will be my coding projects. Ironically, that’s the one part of the site that I haven’t yet finished. Hopefully early next week I’ll figure that out.
Allmusic.com gets a redesign Monday (07-12)! I’m excited! Update 07-12: Hey, my math was wrong, I think. Tuesday.
Ridiculously detailed cruise ship illustration, and how it was made. The resulting Photoshop file was 988MB!
Why Fiona Apple’s new album hasn’t been released. Two good songs from the album, “Better Version of Me” and “Extraordinary Machine” have been leaked online.
So it looks like Moveable Type might end up doing what I want it to do. It’s not my favorite solution, though. I was trying to protest the 3.0 license changes, since it kinda keeps Coolass from being able to upgrade without paying $70 or 100. Blosxom was pretty close to what I wanted, but web-based management out-of-the-box is really nice, and the templating in MT is second-to-none.
Need to get commenting working, need to get a few other things looked at, and I’m going to do some experimenting with MTPhotoGallery.
This is a test of the MT blogging system. Dear God, I hope this ends up working.
(Hey, just testing the extended part.)
Google News has a little tiny section labelled “in the news” where it picks what are usually names that are popular (on the right, just above the “U.S” section). Two capitalized words in a row usually equals a name or a place, especially when they’re popular in the online news media. Since (Senator) John Kerry has picked (Senator) John Edwards as his running mate, Google News now thinks “Senator John” is the best thing since sliced bread.
Go to the Batman Begins web site. Click on the rusty Batman logo, you get two pictures of the “batmobile”. Click on either one of them, and you get three pictures of Christian Bale as Bruce/Batman.
If nothing else, we can be sure that this movie will look great. Those pics with Bale in the cape and cowl just exude atmosphere if you ask me. But what the hell is up with that battank? Huh? Update 07-06: Nevermind, the photos have disappeared.
Nomad, M, and I did some geocaching at White Memorial this weekend. We looked for four caches, and only ended up finding one (blame me for not bringing all of the necessary clues). The one we found was supposed to require kayaks or canoes, but we just beat back the woods to get to it.