The Lottery Reloaded

So my company offers clients mathematical analysis of trends and probabilities. We also have an office lottery pool. Make of that what you will.

The Homestuck Bechdel Analysis

Before we begin this post, I feel it prudent to make a confession. It's probably not even a confession, since it's likely that everyone knows it already-- more like an admission of guilt regarding a crime of which I have already been accused, or at least suspected. There is... a web comic. No! Not a web comic, exactly, or at least, not only a web comic. There is a long, multi-arc narrative spanning a wide range of different styles of expression, including traditional web comics, interactive puzzle-solving games, gorgeous animation scored by a multitude of experimental musicians, long-winded chat logs delving into the nature of causality, and equally long-winded chat logs probing the nature of alien reproductive biology. There is a thing called Homestuck, and it is a silly thing that I love dearly.

Texting and Driving and Error and Ethics

Recently, my friend Abhi suggested that I do a "controversial" blog post on texting while driving, specifically about "how dangerous is it actually?" This was in response to a recent American Academy of Pediatrics study that found nearly half of teens reported texting while driving, and that the behavior was very strongly associated with other risky behaviors like drunk driving and infrequent seatbelt use. To quote Abhi's suggestion from Facebook:

I haven't seen the studies, but I'm guessing there's a huge selection bias in incidents reported where texting "led" to an accident, because you condition on searching for texting by seeing the accident. The cases where texting doesn't lead to an accident don't get reported. To take an absurd example to illustrate the point, I bet you'd find a similar correlation for accidents and having previously had a soda. Or Chewing gum. Or *wearing seatbelts*. I'll bet you that in 90% of accidents that occur people were wearing seatbelts *grins*.

I have no doubt that Abhi's intentions were benign, but I found the suggestion unsettling. I responded by saying that I didn't want to encourage texting while driving, and he questioned why I should feel bad about investigating a mathematical claim. Well, it's complicated. I'll try to explain.

Alfnak Alfventures

Hey there readers! Quick post about an interesting Skyrim mod I played through recently. You can find "Alfnak Ruin" here, along with the results of the (no longer active) survey that goes with it. It's a pretty straightforward dungeon, nothing spectacular if you're looking for cool Skyrim mods (if you are, that's a TOTALLY different blog post, on probably a totally different blog), but I liked the fact that it was created for the purpose of gathering data. Stats? And Skyrim?! How could I say no?



I predict with 95% confidence that this place is full of SW33T LOOT.

Adventures in the Sexy Vacuum: Can We Please Stop Asking Whether Men and Women can be Friends?

Lately, I've been talking with friends, acquaintances and coworkers about the annoyingly persistent question of whether a man and a woman can be "just friends." This all started when YouTube suggested the following video to me. Ten points for spotting the implicit sexism!

If you watch the video, you'll notice several of the factors that contribute to the head-banging, teeth-grinding inanity of this so-called debate. For one thing, the whole question is pretty damn hetero-normative-- pretty sure that the gay trans-men I know don't resent me for not banging them. It's also set up to make women look like idiots. The filmmaker asks leading questions whose answers are unavoidably speculative ("Of those guy friends, do you think any of them secretly like you?") and creates hypothetical situations that change the nature of the relationships in question ("Would Dave hook up with you if you gave him the chance?") Probably the most succinct example of this video's stupidity lies in the conversation that starts at about the 1:50 mark.

Statistics of the Hidden Temple

Nineties nostalgia is so in right now around the blogosphere. My generation hit peak television-watching in the early to mid-nineties. Twenty years later, we're hitting our peak analytical-blogging years. Thus, the ultimate result of this alignment of the planets, the timing of our parents' unprotected sex, and the programing decisions of Nickelodeon executives is an ongoing explosion of blog posts about Legends of the Hidden Temple.

The theme music will be stuck your head all day. You're welcome!

They range from in-depth scene-by-scene analysis to candid interviews with past contestants to impassioned rants, but there are a few themes uniting them all.

You know what's coming next.

Residuals: What the hell are they, and why are they important?

Lady luck has blessed me recently with some AP Stats students in need of tutoring, and it's been wonderful getting to tutor in my area of expertise! Not that I dislike helping students with geometry proofs or trigonometric calculations; it's just nice to work with my favorite flavor of mathematics for a change. The perennial "when am I going to use this in real life?" question is a lot easier to answer when it's asked about statistics.

One of the questions that my students have been asking is why they should care about residuals. It's a valid question! High school math classes don't typically have time to cover the reasoning behind their subjects with much depth, so the only thing most high school students know about residuals is "it's bad if the residuals have a pattern." They don't know why it's bad, or what exactly the residuals are, and they're often confused as to why this is the one time in their stats class when they want to see a scatterplot with no correlation at all. Truthfully, I didn't really understand much about the importance of residuals until late in my college career.