Ghostbusters Truck at Philcon

Saw this Ghostbusters decked out truck at Philcon in Cherry Hill New Jersey today.

Compact Car Only or unless you can't read

These spaces in north Wilmington are notoriously small, so they are correctly labelled "Compact Car Only". I can only conclude that adult illiteracy is still a big problem as the driver of this black pickup truck has failed to follow these instructions. The act is made more agregious by the fact that his tailget has one of those extensions on it, filled with sod, that only makes the truck even longer and more inappropriate for the space. If a car had parked on the other side, though I am not sure how they could, no one could have entered or exited the parking lot.

The alternative to them being illiterate is that they are a jerk. What do you think?

Creepy eyeball left over Halloween candy

Still encountering leftover Haloween candy like this creepy eyeball. It's creepy but I ate it anyway, because it was chocolate.

Fledging sparrows at the end of summer

Towards the end of summer we noticed that some birds had built a nest in the large flower pots that we have on our front porch, but never really saw any birds in it. In early September at the end of summer, all of the sudden the House Sparrows that had hatched were ready to fledge. I captured what appeared to be two babies and two parents during the first flight event. Ah, the wonders of nature.

The Trouble with "V"

We watched the highly-anticipated "V" this past week. I must not willingly suspend my disbelief any more or have lost my senswunda because I couldn't watch the pilot episode (or most TV for that matter) without picking holes in the plot and science. I understand that science must be stretched to accommodate an ostensible science fictional show, but stretch it too far, or perhaps the character's in the show response to it and I think you start to lose your audience. My comments below contain spoilers from the pilot episode so be sure to watch it before you continue reading.

When the aliens show up in their own spaceship in orbit round your planet, you have already lost the battle. They have the high ground and they can just drop rocks on you until you submit. And that's just using the laws of physics as we know them. Interplanetary travel is hard enough, interstellar is practically impossible (takes a lot of energy) given our current understanding of physics. (Charles Stross has recently done a rift on this.) These aliens would need antigravity or something like it, which they apparently do have. I suppose the the V must get to Earth or there is no story.

Why doesn't anybody but the one newscaster comment on how much the V look like humans? He asks why they are all so attractive, I would ask why they look anything like us at all. Convergent evolution? Long lost brothers from a prehistoric human space empire? All of these explanations have important consequences, especially for the plot. If they are humans from another place why would Earth authorities ever let them set foot on the planet in these days of H1N1 swine flu, SARS, AIDS and weaponized anthrax, without wearing spacesuits to prevent them contaminating us with diseases we have never encountered before. I think history tells us what happens when two previously isolated human populations encounter each other for the first time.

Perhaps they are not human and are just wearing disguises so that we feel more comfortable around them. That opens up the question of how they developed the disguises and how long have they really been on Earth, how did they learn all of our languages, etc. When the secret V resistance meets and then gets wiped out by V infiltrators, it is not a surprise at how well they fit in give their looks. It is a surprise that anyone needs to be convinced that there are V among us. When the human survivors leave they should have taken some V bodies with them to expose the conspiracy. That would have been more important than their lives.

Perhaps the disguises are due to a really good knowledge of human physiology. Just how did they figure out how to cure human diseases anyway? That sounds like they would have had to do some experimentation to get it right. And thus we are right back to some obvious clues that the V have been on Earth long before they announced themselves and those alien abduction stories might be true.

I suppose because the show is a political allegory of the Obama administration (really) and not science fiction, that I shouldn't be surprised that none of the characters embedded in the story ask any of these important questions. At least they mentioned Independence Day when the ships show up. If aliens ever do show up in spaceships around Earth, they will have to deal with all of preconceptions formed from movie after movie exploring such a scenario. However, the current state of humanity is that it appears that we are alone in the universe, Enrico Fermi himself asked where is everybody. It is hard to explain why there appears to be only one place in the universe where intelligent life exists, even harder to explain why there would be only two. Stephen Baxter has written three novels and countless short stories just explaining away.

In spite of the implausibilities I will continue watching V to see if it improves, and because I seem to get as much fun out of picking apart television series as just watching them these days.

How often does the winner of the third game win the World Series after a split first two games.

As I noticed searches landing on my earlier posts about World Series probabilities, I noticed that fans are asking "How often does the team that wins the third game of the World Series win the whole thing". From history that chance is 68%, from a simulation in which it assumed that either team has a 50% chance of winning a game it is 65%.

A better questions relates to the current situation going into tonight's World Series game. If the teams split the first two games, how often does the winner of the third game go on to win the series? In history, teams have split the first two games 50 out of 99 times, and the next team to win has gone on to win it all 35 of those games or 70% of the time. The simulations show a similar 50% of the trials have a split in the first two games, and 70% of those splits have the team that wins the third game willing the Series.

How often does the first team to win a game win the World Series if they lose the second game?

After last night's loss of the Phillies to the Yankees the World Series is tied one game to one game. I thought that I could update the information from yesterday on the probability that the team that wins the first game of the World Series wins the whole series.

Now the question is "What is the probability that the team that wins the first game of the series and loses the second wins the World Series?" A review of 100 years or so of World series data (plus looking at each series on wikipedia) shows that 50% of the time the teams in the World Series split the first two games. This provides our data set. 50% of the teams that won the first game and lose the second win the World Series.

That makes perfect sense, now the teams are one and one and each team has to win three games to win the whole thing. It becomes a best of five series. Simulations with 10,000 trials and assuming that the teams win 50% of the time confirm the historical trend. In 50% of the cases when the teams split the first two games, the winner of the first game goes on to win the World Series 50% of the time.

How often does the winner of the first game win the World Series

The Fox announcers off-handedly mentioned after the Phillies first game win that the team that won the first game of the World Series has gone on to win the Series in the past six years. I wondered if this was an interesting statistic or an obvious one. If you think about it, once a team wins one game of the series they only have to win three more games, where as there opponent must win four to win. Winning the first game has an inherent obvious advantage. Perhaps that stat isn't so interesting.

We can simulate a World Series by choosing a probability of winning a game, 50% seems a fair starting point, and then counting games. Once a team wins four games, perform no further game simulations for that series. Simulating 10,000 series allows the collection of some statistics and probabilities. For instance, the number of games in a series if the games are a toss up (one team wins 50% of the time) is shown in the chart below.

The exact result for how many games will occur in a World Series if each team wins 50% of the time is 4 games 1/8 of the time, 5 games 1/4 of the time and 6 and 7 games 5/16 of the time for both. This is a good check on our simulation.

The results from 100 years of World Series (including only best of seven series) closely parallels the simulations, with four game series slightly more common.

To answer the first question, 10,000 trials shows that if the games are a toss up the winner of the first game goes on to win the World Series 65.6% of the time. A glance back at almost 100 years of World Series, (eliminating ones that were not best of seven, and using wikipedia to see which team won first), shows that historically the first team to win wins the series 66% of the time. Perhaps that stat from Fox isn't so surprising.

Varying the probability that one team (say the National League team) wins from 50% lets the simulation explore the probability that the first team to win a game wins the series. Obviously if one team wins 100% of the time, they win the first game and the series. This is also the same as if one team wins 0% of the time, the other team wins the first game and the series. The middle result (50% probability of winning a game), reported above, is 65.6%. The plot below shows how this varies with the probability of the National League team winning. Given that the historical result is that the first team to win a game in the World Series wins the Series 66% of the time, it is reasonable to expect that the chance one or the other team would win a given World series game is close to 50%, or at least somewhere between 40% and 60%.

Finally the simulation reveals the number of games played, the series winner and the winner of the first game. The plot below shows that histogram.


Because the simulation is only 10,000 trials, the results here are probably plus or minus 0.5%.

Caterpillars

At the end of September, I noticed some large banded and spotted caterpillars finishing off the last of the parsley in the garden.

There were about five caterpillars.

They crawled up and down the stems denuding the plants of any leaves. When the y got the end of a stalk they would get confused and then turn around and start down again.




I thought that these might be Monarch Butterfly caterpillars, but a search at this site revealed that these are likely to be the second instar or moult of the caterpillar stage of Black Swallowtail caterpillars. The pictures match and the wikipedia article (Black Swallowtail, Papilio polyxenes) even mentions that they like to eat plants from the carrot family like dill and parsley.

You are reading the polls and this chart incorrectly

TYWKIWDBI presents a chart aggregating polls from Pollster.com which seems to indicate that the Democrats and Republicans are losing voters who are becoming independent. Here is TYWKIWDBI's repost of the Pollster chart:


That conclusion can only be made if you actually ignore the points (besides the fact the the X axis labels are lost). Pollster has plunked a solid line which appears to be the average of the data from all of these polls. That's all well and good, but the points that the average is made from are all over the place. here I have replotted the polls and included the 90th and 10th percentile of the last 20 polls for each of the party affiliations. The heavy solid lines are the average of the last 20 polls, red for Republicans, blue for Democrats and green for Independents, the lighter solid lines are the 90th and 10th percentile of the last 20 polls. The points are the individual polls plotted on the ending date of the poll period. The data is all right under the chart at Pollster.com.

Close examination (click on the chart above for a large version) of this very cluttered chart reveals that you could draw lines which trend up or down or stay the same for any any of the affiliations and not leave the area between the between the 90th and 10th percentile lines. Print it out and try it or replot it yourself.

The most you can confidently say about this chart is, "wow, there is a lot of scatter in these poll results." I don't think that you can state with confidence that there has been a statistically significant change in Democratic or Independent affiliation. I am not even sure there is a decrease in Republican affiliation. Shame on you Pollster.com for putting in those average lines, and shame on you TYWKIWDBI for reposting it with your faulty conclusions. Bad statistics, bad presentation (including my cluttered chart).