planetwater

I did a wonderful #statistics experiment with students in stats class the other day on random numbers:

I divided the class into two groups. I gave a coin to one group and told them to flip this coin 20 times and record the resulting sequence of heads and tails. I asked the other group to come up with sequence of heads and tails in their heads and record the best sequence they can come up with. I told them I would leave the room and come back after five minutes, look at both sequences, and tell them which was created by the coin and which one in the heads of the other group.

These are the two sequences they came up with

HTTTTHHTHHHHTTHHHHTT

and

HTHTHTHTHTHTTHTHTTTH

Can you guess which sequence was constructed by what group?

Here is some background:

• Nice explanation using Markov Chains by Paul Ginsparg
• I had borrowed the idea from Ilya Perederiy, and especially from this vido by “numberfile” linked to on Ilya’s blog
• the post “Randomness: The Ghost In The Machine?” raises a few interesting philosophical questions, such as why Lady Justice, is usually both carrying sword/scales and is blindfolded, hence including an element of randomness to her. There is also some historical context, such as sometimes political leaders have been chose through random processes: “in Renaissance Venice, the doge was chosen by sortition — a type of lottery”, which a process that this wikipedia article confirms.

I have setup a raspberry pi as a measurement computer. Now I can access it

a) on my Mac by mounting a directory, using SSHFS 2.5.0 via

sshfs -o volname="<MOUNT_NAME>" <USER>@<IP_ADRESS>:<directory_on_raspberry> <directory_on_my_mac>

b) on my iPad! I use OpenTerm to ssh into the machine, run scripts, and I use ShellFish (currently in beta) to basically mount the directory with the output into the file system (I mean into the Files App) on my iPad.

Whoooopeee!!

I had linked to a post by Peter Rukvina’s last time. I am doing it again – this time he linked to Rosie, who started a blog in 2019 called “press pound”.

I can’t applaud Peter’s comment enough:

I’m happy to see the corner turn from “why did blogging die when we loved it so?” to “I’m going to start a new blog!”