Boiling water in 1g and micro-g environments
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Mistakes? What Were the Odds of That?
What’s luck got to do with it? The maths of gambling
He wasn’t on a lucky streak, he was using his knowledge of mathematics to understand, and beat, the odds.
“Beat the odds” isn’t quite as bad as “defies the laws of physics,” I think. But exploiting knowledge of the odds to win isn’t beating the odds. Beating the odds is winning when you shouldn’t — drawing to an inside straight and hitting it to win a hand is beating the odds. Exploiting the situation to make the odds go in your favor — making it so you should win more than you lose — is not.
A spin of the roulette wheel is just like the toss of a coin. Each spin is independent, with a 50:50 chance of the ball landing on black or red.
Well, no. A roulette wheel has 37 or 38 slots, depending on where you play, with 36 of them being black or red. The others are green — 0 and 00 (Europe has one, the US has both. Sort of.) That’s why the house makes profit offering “even money” on black or red bets on a US wheel; the probability of winning is slightly less than 50%. (They also make money on the single-number payouts, at 35:1) All of the bets on a 00 roulette wheel have a house advantage of at least 5.26%; single-0 wheels have a smaller house advantage but there also seems to be a correlation with higher-stakes limits. The previous link also presents a section on debunking the “doubling down” method for roulette. Winning at roulette is truly “beating the odds” since the house always has an advantage.
So please don’t follow the advice here. But note this:
For what it is worth, the sum of all the numbers in roulette is 666.
Bang Bang!
A Tad Optimistic
Low-Budget Fusion Reactor Could Generate Energy within a Decade
Could. If it, you know, actually works.
The biggest challenge with the design will likely be showing that the technique actually works; no one has ever demonstrated that spheromaks can be compressed enough – while maintaining their donut shape – to create fusion.
D’oh!
Bugs!
Blitzen, sans Donner
Green Eggs and Maybe Ham
Everyday Scientist: food carbon
Bottom line: cows produce a lot of GHG.
They're Wafer Thin
Saturn’s rings to disappear Tuesday
The rings shine because they reflect sunlight. But every 15 years, the rings turn edge-on to the sun and reflect almost no sunlight.
Particle Physics Publishing = Real Estate
Timing and location count when announcing particle physics results
Together, these points make it clear that researchers in HEP don’t use journals to communicate scientific ideas. They may notice a paper is published, and they certainly value the peer-review and other functions provided by the journals, but they don’t communicate using the journals; instead they use arXiv, which is much faster.
Pick a Peck of Pixels
A pixel, from Earth to the Moon, to the infinite and beyond
How big of a screen would you need to resolve the Apollo craft as a single pixel in an image which includes the earth and the moon?
Speaking of higher resolution, while I was contemplating Olbrich’s image I started thinking of what would be the size of Apollo space shuttle in the image. It would certainly be so tiny that it would be invisible to us. The next geekiest question would be: what should be the image’s minimum resolution to make the modules appear as a single pixel?