A couple years ago, I heard about the “monty hall problem”, a question of probability that just was totally counterintuitive to me (and also a ton of mathematicians, so I don’t feel bad)… Here’s the situation:

You are offered a choice of three doors. Behind one is a car, behind the other two are goats. You pick Door #1 (for example). The host opens Door #2 and reveals a goat, then offers you the chance to switch your choice with #3.

Now, most people look at this and say “well now my chance is 50-50, I may as well stay”. But that isn’t the case. You actually have a much higher chance of winning if you switch doors. The reason is that the host knows what is behind the doors and deliberately opened a losing door, so while your original choice has a 1/3 chance of winning, the other door now has (odd as it may sound) a 2/3 chance to win.

You can try it yourself with this flash game over on the NY Times site:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/science/08monty.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Really, go give it a try.

I looked at a nissan altima hybrid, which our editors say is the best hybrid you can buy, the one for people who like to drive, lowest true cost to own in its price range, etc… and well, it just bored me.

Then I got to tell the salesman and his boss that I wsn’t going to buy anything tonight like 40 times. This after they offered me about 8 grand less on my trade in than I owe on it…

And then I drove my car off their lot, stepped on the gas, listened to the engine… and you know, I don’t really want a different car.

Yes, the altima is sensible, its would be a smart decision, especially since I had them willing to make me a killer deal (they know where I work, and its month end)… but no, there’s more important things in this life than making the sensible choice. Especially when you can afford not to.

Started using the firefox beta the other day after a developer gave me crap for using the latest stable…

Aside from it crashing all the time and being blazingly slow, it was pretty neat. Not many addons support it yet, and I’m addon crazy…

I did find that with an about:config setting to disable ipv6 dns lookups, firefox is back up to its expected zippiness, and possibly even faster than v2. And it hasn’t crashed on me in a few hours… Starting to see some potential here.

The top one on the page is a casino in vegas that they blew up on my last birthday… Sucks that I missed it.

http://weburbanist.com/2008/03/05/16-sweet-and-scary-building-demolitions-in-action/

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=ninja&l1=&q2=cowboy&l2=&q3=pirate&l3=

http://www.thebachelorguy.com/sex-around-the-world-cheesy-pickup-lines-in-every-language.html

I was briefly in training about Agile methodology yesterday. Our developers have been using Agile for a while and the rest of the company is making the transition now. All of operations thinks its a bad idea.

The training did produce a couple gems, though… Like when the trainer was asked (I shit you not, these are quotes)…

“So, what you’re saying is, with agile any code that gets released is bug free?”

*pause*

Trainer: “Yes.”

http://www.vagabondish.com/personalized-your-name-was-here-graffiti-art-in-palestine/