probability

Expect tantrums from BabyPlan

If you're serious about getting pregnant, you probably know that tracking your menstrual cycles and ovulation is a great way to increase your odds. There are plenty of ways to do this; you can do it the old-fashioned way, using a calendar, or there are any number of Web sites that can do much of the work for you. Or, if you're an Excel user, you can use a spreadsheet.

That's what BabyPlan is: an Excel workbook that helps you calculate your cycle length, predict ovulation, calculate due dates, and even predict the sex of your baby. … Read more

Virtual monkeys recreate Shakespeare? Methinks not

I was pleasantly surprised today to hear of Jesse Anderson's success in getting randomly typing virtual monkeys to recreate a Shakespeare poem.

Alas and alack, though, I found this tale of computational prowess conquering statistical improbability too good to be true.

Anderson said his virtual monkeys successfully recreated A Lover's Complaint, an astounding accomplishment given that it has, by my count, 13,940 characters in 2,587 words. Anderson, a programmer in Reno, Nev., said on Friday:

Today (2011-09-23) at 2:30 PST the monkeys successfully randomly recreated "A Lover's Complaint." This is the first … Read more

Spam annihilator

Most big-time e-mail clients offer some kind of spam filtering, as do many antivirus packages. There are also standalone spam-stoppers out there; as it happens, one of the best we've tried is also free. It's called Spamihilator, short for spam annihilator, and seems to sound best when pronounced "spam-EYE-uh-lator." It's a brainy e-mail filter that stands between your e-mail client and your account's connection, scanning incoming messages and sorting out the spam. It learns as you use it, with a little help from you. It supports plug-ins, POP3 and IMAP accounts, and secure connections.… Read more

In the antechamber of hope or why creatives and academics were so receptive to Obama

I am finally reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s mesmerizing book The Black Swan – The Impact of The Highly Improbable, and I am intrigued by the parallels you can draw to Obama’s campaign (they may be quite a stretch, but those are the best, no?)

In a chapter titled “Living in the Antechamber of Hope,” Taleb refers to empirical research showing that on average venture capitalists capitalize better on innovations than the actual innovator, that publishers make more money with books than writers, that agents do better than artists, and that R&D managers do better than scientists: “The … Read more