Odds of winning the lottery versus being impaled by an icicle
The odds against winning today’s $1+ billion Mega Millions come to over 300 million to 1. According to these statistics from the National Weather Service, the chances in being hit by lightning strike in any given year are far greater—about 1 in a million.
Being in the dead of winter, I’m more worried about the icicles hanging over our walkway.
I cannot find any ‘official’ statistics on the odds of dying from one of these frozen daggers, but it must be on par with winning the lottery.
Though it makes far more sense for me to invest in a helmet rather than the Mega Millions, I bought 5 tickets just to participate in the dream. It’s fun doing something irrational every so often!
To get the math on the odds and tips on improving them (such as: pick at random!), see this post by Davidson College Professor Tim Davidson.
Smoot points about measurements
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on January 4, 2023
Does it really matter that the calendar turned over from December 2022 to January 2023? From where I sit nothing much changed from one day—12/31/22—to the next—1/1/23. It’s just as cold here in Minnesota—below freezing (32 F or 0 C: Take your pick). Must we pay any attention to an irrelevant measure of time passing by? Of course, the answer is “yes” for everyone to party on a timely basis for the New Year, birthdays, and anniversaries. However, I feel badly for my niece’s daughter born on Leap Day 2020—no 1st birthday until 2024. That’s a measurement failure. Anyways, Happy New Year!
Also, why do we continue to favor English versus metric units here in the USA? That is a huge waste! Let’s begin the conversion by expanding the football fields to 100 meters. The players won’t even notice the 10 percent increase in required effort. My feeling is that this will be the breakthrough to the far more sensible and scientific metric system—a movement that seemed certain to succeed when Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. Unfortunately, this became a political football when folks here in the Midwest resisted being told to post their distances in kilometers rather than miles.
The silliness of the archaic English anthropometric measures, such as height in feet and quantities of spices in pinches, came to a head in 1958 when frat brothers from MIT flipped a pledge named Oliver Smoot over-and-over the length of the Mass. Ave. bridge for a total of 364.4 Smoots (plus “one ear”*). In 2016, the MIT Alumni magazine published this April Fool’s joke that the Institute planned to recalibrate the Smoot to its namesakes current height (presumably a bit shrunken by the decades). What I find most interesting is that Smoot later served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute and president of the International Organization for Standardization. He went all out, literally, for the sake of measurements!
By way, it snowed 4 and 3/16ths of an inch yesterday according to my double Helix measuring ‘stick’. For my own purposes, I always use the metric side of this ruler—much preferring its decimal system (m/cm/mm, etc.) over the cumbersome fractions of inches. But to keep things simple, I pay the teenager next door by the inch.
PS It snowed another 6 inches overnight, bringing the total to 25 cm or so (deliberately mixing measurement scales to make my point). In any case, I need a taller ruler!
*Per Smoot in this 1995 interview. I first heard of him from the November 21st Wall Street Journal review of “Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants.” For details and reader ratings (assuming you like accurate measurements!) of this new book, I recommend you go to this Goodreads site.
Age vs happiness—some ups and downs
Posted by mark in Uncategorized, Wellness on December 19, 2022
The “mid-life crisis” provides endless amusement from over-the-hill fellows trying to hold on to their youth via frivolous purchases (e.g., a sportscar) and foolish escapades (e.g., young women). A few years ago, economist David Blanchflower pinpointed 47.2 as the age when unhappiness reaches this minimum.* However, my re-analysis of his data indicate a very plausible complication to this picture: A late 20s dip creating a double “U” in the happiness curve.
After importing Blanchflower’s life-satisfaction data** into Stat-Ease software, I applied a 6th order polynomial model—not just the 2nd order quadratic typically used for simplification. This more sophisticated analysis reveals an initial dip at 24.1 years before the ‘mid-life crisis’ coming at 50.9 years of age.
Of course, all of us differ individually in our happiness throughout our lives, but it is interesting to see how we compare to the average person in this regard. Although I would not mind a rejuvenation to my mid-20s physical fitness, it really is great to be well past the unhappiness of those youthful days and the subsequent stress that comes at mid-life. Old guys really do rule for happiness by my reckoning.
Cheers!
*Research Shows People Become Increasingly Unhappy Until Age 47.2, Inc., 1/30/20.
**Figure 2: “US Gallup Daily Tracker Cantril’s 11-step life satisfaction ladder, 2008-2018, no control curve”, Is happiness U-shaped everywhere? Age and subjective well-being in 145 countries, David G. Blanchflower, Journal of Population Economics, v34, pp 575–624, 9/9/20.
Embrace coincidences to shore up your well-being
Posted by mark in Uncategorized, Wellness on October 19, 2022
Being a believer in the power of positivity, I am always on the lookout for the bright side of life. For example, while out for a very chilly walk this morning, I was delighted to see a dozen or so bluebirds perched along a fence next to the sidewalk. I embraced this happy coincidence!
Professor David Hand, former Chair in Statistics at Imperial College, London, made a case that these little miracles occur daily.* You just need to be pay attention. I got some great reinforcement for collecting coincidences from a report last week by Wall Street Journal columnist Elizabeth Anne Bernstein.** She provided a great example of a fortuitous series of events that led to a wonderful meeting with a friend of her father, who passed away earlier this year.
“Surprising concurrent events can help us reach decisions, soothe us in grief and tighten our connections to others.
Elizabeth Anne Bernstein
Although some people believe in divine causes for coincidences such as Elizabeth’s,*** I think they occur at random and get selectively noticed due to personal biases. In any case, I am happy for anyone who gains comfort from them.
PS For an excellent breakdown of coincidence by serendipity (“happy accidents”) versus synchronicity (an acausal “falling together in time” see this 2021 Psychology Today explanation by Bernard D. Beitman, M.D. of Meaningful Coincidences.
PPS On a related, more humorous note, check out this ‘heads-up’ on the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Eery!
*See my 2014 blog explaining why Laws of nature lead to rare events that really ought not surprise anyone
**The Hidden Power of Coincidences
***For example, many believed in a heavenly arrangement for the simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826—exactly 50 years after each had signed the Declaration of Independence.
Eschew surplusage
Posted by mark in Communication, Uncategorized on October 8, 2022
This is Mark Twain’s humorous advice for jargon-prone writers who fail to “employ a simple and straightforward style.”* In case you’re wondering, “surplusage” means “unnecessary or irrelevant language.” This obscure term is mainly used by the legal profession. Isn’t that ironic?
Here are some promising developments for citizens in English-speaking countries who suffer from surplusage at the hands of their lawyer-riddled governments:
- The Plain Language bill now coming to a final vote by the New Zealand Parliament may make simple-English training mandatory for their public servants.**
- Twelve years ago this month, the USA enacted the Plain Writing Act of 2010 establishing that Government documents issued to the public must be written clearly.
- A recent Labradorian-commissioned comparative study of “ordinary” versus “plain” English showed significant improvements in reading speed, understanding, retention and appreciation.**
- The 2022 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the authors (Martinez, et al) of Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language (not at all ignoble—lawyers should be held accountable for incomprehensible contracts).
“Contracts contain “startlingly” high proportions of difficult-to-process (“complex psycholinguistic) features including low frequency jargon, centre-embedded clauses, passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalisation.”
Eric Martinez and Edward Gibson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Francis Mollica at the University of Edinburgh
Poor writing is not confined to government or legal communications. Those of us who work in the scientific arena must work mightily to decipher reports intended to provide “accessibly erudite progressive rigor” (the first phrase that came up for me at this Academic B.S. Generator). I found some hope from these studies:
- A randomized, controlled study on thousands of subjects “indicating the detrimental effects of providing too many details on statistical concepts.”***
- A call**** by statistician Karen Grace-Martin to work on reducing four major sources of confusion for terminology rising to a level of “absurdity”:
- “Single terms with multiple meanings,” e.g., alpha and beta used for linear-model coefficients as well as to symbolize risk versus power.
- “Terms with colloquial meanings in English and technical definitions in statistics,” e.g., “error” (supposedly early statisticians got so much criticism from managers about too many errors that they started calling these “residuals).
- “Similar terms with nuanced meanings,” e.g., General Linear Model and Generalized Linear Model (being an engineer-only, I have trouble with this distinction).
- “Multiple terms with one basic meaning,” e.g., a long list of synonyms for “mixed models”.
Down with bureaucratic language, legalese and technical jargon!
*See rules #14 #18 (speaking plainly) in Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses
**The Effectiveness of Plain Language Proven by Data, 2020
***Kerwer, et al, How to Put It Plainly? , 2021.
Spacecraft DART scores a direct hit on asteroid Dimorphos
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on September 27, 2022
It was amazing to see today the videos from NASA showing a direct hit by their spacecraft DART (an acronym for “Double Asteroid Redirection Test”) on the asteroid Dimorphos.
Here are some amazing statistics on this astounding feat of physics:
- DART traveled 56,000 miles to accomplish its $330 million suicidal mission against the 560-foot diameter Dimorphos.
- DART came in at 1,260 pounds to impact the 11-billion-pound Dimorphos, similar in scale to a house-fly smashing into an NFL running back. This seems harmless if not for the fact that the fly is going 15,000 miles per hour!
- NASA’s boffins predict that the impact will shift the orbit of Dimorphos around its bigger sibling Didymos by 1%–reducing it by 7 minutes from the current rate of about 12 hours per revolution.
The big question is: Could we really deflect an asteroid heading for Earth? Given the success of DART, I am now a lot more optimistic that, by the time a planet-threatening object comes our way, a defense system will be in place.
“We do not currently know of any object of “moderate” size which has a chance of impact in the next 100 years. …Please keep in mind that anything smaller than about 30 meters in size will have an airburst and is unlikely to reach ground (excluding metallic NEAs). Our atmosphere is very efficient at protecting us from small impacts.”
– Asteroid scientist Marina Brozovic
Stay on task when working on your computer or pay the price
Gone are the good old days during the pandemic when you could slack off work and chat online with your friends and family or wander away for a long spell. According to a worldwide survey of 816 organizations by IDC Global conducted in July, nearly half of all large organizations (over 500 employees) now deploy monitoring software. More and more employers feed these analytics into algorithms that rate relative performance. They then tie the productivity score directly to their worker’s compensation.
You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
George Orwell, 1984, speaking on how intrusively “Big Brother” watches you
Will this surveillance make digital workers do more, or will it backfire and cause “quiet quitting”? For some thoughts on this from an expert in the field of human relations, see Employee monitoring: Why it’s ‘dysfunctional’ but gaining popularity by Phil Albinus, Tech Editor for HR Executive.
New insights this summer on human limits to heat
Posted by mark in Uncategorized, Wellness on August 19, 2022
These late August days in Minnesota bring back poignant memories of the treasured time after the dog days of summer with the start of school looming. The cool breezes of late summer provided welcome relief for the sleepless nights spent sweltering on the top level of my bunk on the second floor of our two-story house in our un-air-conditioned bedroom.
Now comes the bad news from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that the average overnight temperature in the USA this July was the hottest on record.* But the good news is that the great majority of households nowadays (as of 2020) feature A/C. For the cool stats, see this 8/15/22 post by the Energy Institute on How Many U.S. Households Don’t Have Air Conditioning.
I never paid much attention to heat and humidity until my undergraduate studies in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota. Then I came to appreciate the impact of ambient conditions. Our lab instructor taught us how to measure moisture in the air via a sling psychrometer such as the one demonstrated very delightfully “down under” here. The resulting reading is called the wet bulb temperature.
If you must venture out into the mid-day sun, be careful not to go beyond what your body can balance for the heat. As reported here on July 6, researchers at Penn State University (PSU) discovered that “heat + humidity gets dangerous faster than many people realize.” Their findings came from experiments on 25 young adults who each swallowed a small telemetry pill, which monitored their core temperature. Previous studies** suggested that most people can tolerate a wet-bulb temperature of up to 95 degrees F. But the new data from PSU lowers this limit to 88 degrees.
“When the body overheats, the heart has to work harder to pump blood flow to the skin to dissipate the heat, and when you’re also sweating, that decreases body fluids. In the direst case, prolonged exposure can result in heat stroke, a life-threatening problem that requires immediate and rapid cooling and medical treatment.”
– W. Larry Kenney, Professor of Physiology, Kinesiology and Human Performance, Penn State, and his PSU H.E.A.T Project team
The tolerance to heat and humidity is certainly even less for people over 65, who, according to the PSU researchers comprise 80-90 percent of heat-wave casualties. They will now shift their experimental focus to this older generation.
Be careful out there!
* “The U.S. in July set a new record for overnight warmth”, The Associated Press, August 13, 2022.
** Sherwood & Huber, “An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 5/3/10, 107 (21) 9552-9555.
Pizza purchasers tricked by not knowing pie are squared
Posted by mark in Consumer behavior on July 29, 2022
Here’s a trick question going the rounds (pun intended) recently*: For the same price, which of these two options provides the best pizza value—one 9 incher or two 5-inch pies?
Many consumers would go for the two smaller pizzas. But going strictly by area, they then come up 38% short of the single large pie. Two for one is not a good deal in this case.
For comparing pizzas by size and price, even those of us that know the math can benefit from calculators like these:
- Nathan Yau’s Pizza Exchange Rate posted earlier this week—nicely slider-barred with a graphic view to make sure you get a fair deal. For example, if you order a mega 30 inch pizza that cannot be delivered, do not settle for anything less than 36 five-inch ones.
- Better yet is this value-based computer by DQYDJ (Don’t Quit Your Day Job) blogger “PK”.
For a fascinating study demonstrating the significance of how poorly people relate diameter of pizzas to their value, see this 2001 Marketing Science publication on Pizzas: p or Square? Psychophysical Biases in Area Comparisons. The research suggests that “consumers understand the [pizza] size increase more readily when presented with pictures of the various sizes versus when merely presented with the diameters.”
The authors go on to say that “the best strategy, however, is to give the actual area numerically.” Though this is obvious, it seems to me that most people who buy pizza would be overwhelmed by all this mathematical detail.
Am I being overly pessimistic?
*Twitter post about restaurant’s mathematical pizza miscalculation goes mega-viral, Michelle De Pacina, July 4, 2022 post by Yahoo.
Studies reveal downsides of not meeting in person
Posted by mark in Communication on June 16, 2022
At the onset of the pandemic-driven quarantine in March of 2020, Stat-Ease closed its office and never looked back. We all began working out of our homes and Stat-Ease training shifted from traditional classroom to distance-based presentation.
Being on a relaxed work schedule (60% time) at my ‘highly experienced’ career stage, this worked out wonderfully for me. Though I really miss the vibrancy of in-person meetings and teaches, this is far outweighed by the convenience of working at my summer or winter homes, or anywhere in between.
Earlier this month Elon Musk bluntly told his employees to return to office or ‘pretend to work’ elsewhere. In more diplomatic fashion, many other employers have already done the same. Aside from the obvious control issues, they may be on to something. According to recent experiments, collaboration at a distance cannot achieve the same results as a traditional in-person work environment.
“Remote work is no longer acceptable… If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned.”
– Elon Musk in an emailed pronouncement to Tesla employees.
For example, on April 27th Nature published findings that Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation. Researchers from the Columbia Business School paired up hundreds of engineers in five different countries in two different groups, randomly assigning half of the pairs to work together in person and the other half to work together in separate, identical rooms using videoconferencing. The teams of two were then tasked with brainstorming—one group (300) coming up with creative ways to manipulate a Frisbee and the other (334) working out alternative uses for bubble wrap. Ultimately, pairs who met in person came up with about 17 percent more ideas than those meeting remotely (Zoom).
Another experiment reported in April by found that Emails and texts in lieu of conversation could negatively affect performance on higher-level job tasks. Study participants who teamed up with a partner in person produced 19 percent fewer errors on a work task than those who could only communicate by text.
Furthermore, a survey of nearly 2000 office workers conducted in early 2021 (when most remained at home due to the pandemic) revealed that 70% experienced some form of mixed-up messaging from their colleagues due to having to do so at a distance. Managers fared the worst (which explains why so many have mandated a return to the office!). For statistical details, see The Digital Communication Crisis.
Given all these issues dealing with the aftermath of the pandemic on office work, I am very happy with my pivot back to a purely technical role after many years as the chief Stat-Ease business administrator. Having no supervisory responsibility for existing or new hires (tricky trying to train at a distance!), I am fine with the array of digital communication tools at my fingertips—Teams, Zoom, Slack, Outlook and all.
Just a bit lonely…
PS An ongoing attempt to work around being physically present makes use of ever developing tools for the metaverse. Based on reports of being Lost and Confused in the Virtual, Immersive World, I am skeptical that this will provide any added value anytime soon. More interesting to me is the advent of holographic meetings a la the WebEx service reviewed on June 1 here. This holds promise as an antidote to Zoom fatigue.