A short history of Japan and Korea

Is here... highly recommended.

The “Monty Hall dilemma”

"Marilyn vos Savant’s column gained national notoriety in the early 1990s, thanks to her response to the “Monty Hall dilemma”: the make-or-break decision facing contestants on the game show Let’s Make a Deal that was then hosted by Hall. The question was posed by Craig Whitaker, of Columbia, Marinaland, on September 9 1990. “Dear Marilyn,” wrote Whitaker. “Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: ‘Do you want to pick door #2?’ Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?”

Savant’s answer, that it was better to switch doors, provoked an extraordinary response: thousands of letters of complaint, many of them from science teachers and academics. “There is enough mathematical illiteracy in this country, and we don’t need the world’s highest IQ propagating more. Shame!” wrote one reader from the University of Florida. “You are the goat!” said another. “You made a mistake, but look at the positive side,” wrote Everett Harman, of the US Army Research Institute. “If all those PhDs were wrong, the country would be in some very serious trouble.”

But Savant had not made a mistake. In the end it took her four columns, hundreds of newspaper stories and a challenge to children to test the options in classroom experiments, to convince her readers that she was right. “Oh, that was so much fun. I just enjoyed these nasty letters I got,” she said. “The audacity of people! I just loved them.”

The key to the solution lies in the role of the host, who will always pick a door which does not have a prize behind it. Statistics from the game show, in which those who switched won about twice as often as those who did not, bear out Savant’s explanation from her third column: “When you first choose door #1 from three, there’s a 1/3 chance that the prize is behind that one and a 2/3 chance that it’s behind one of the others. But then the host steps in and gives you a clue. If the prize is behind #2, the host shows you #3, and if the prize is behind #3, the host shows you #2. So when you switch, you win if the prize is behind #2 or #3. You win either way! But if you don’t switch, you win only if the prize is behind door #1.”

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

At work, all PC's are typically locked down.... Meaning you have very limited rights as a Windows user... Nobody can install any new programs, the only writeable location is "My Documents" etc etc.. Any program installation have to be done by IT Helpdesk...

For technology employees esp those who do coding, this is a serious issue. So there is a way for developers to get admin rights on the work PC... It is called DevAccess. DevAccess is a program that allows you to request for admin rights.. The request will be reviewed, and after approval the developer's user-id will get admin rights on that particular PC...

When you open DevAccess, at the bottom of the window is the quote... "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Being the curious sort, I did some research on this phrase...

"Quis custōdiet ipsōs custōdēs? is a Latin phrase from the Roman poet Juvenal, which literally translates to "Who will guard the guards themselves?", and is variously translated in colloquial English as "Who watches the watchmen?", "Who watches the watchers?", "Who will guard the guards?", "Who shall watch the watchers?", "Who polices the police?" or other similar translations."

NICE!!!

What I Learned Today: Dunning-Kruger effect

Finally a scientific study proving what we have known all along...

The Dunning-Kruger effect proves that people who know very little think they know everything, while people who are very competent are not very confident in their abilities.

See the wikipedia article.

What I learned today: Snafu, Fubar

Saw this on the tele just now...

In WW2, many enlisted men were fed up with the quality of officers and the mess that they were being gotten into. So they came up with code words to communicate the situations amongst each other...

Snafu - Situation normal, all fucked up
fubar - fucked up beyond all recognition

What I learned today: 20th Century Limited

20th Century Limited was an express passenger train operated by the New York Central Railroad from 1902 to 1967, during which time it would become known as a "National Institution" and the "Most Famous Train in the World."

Interesting stuff about this train

• Passengers walked to and from the train on a plush, crimson carpet which was rolled out in New York and Chicago and was specially designed for the 20th Century Limited, thus the "red carpet treatment" was born.
• Carnations were given to men boarding the train, and perfume and flowers to the women.
• In 1928, its peak year, it earned revenues of $10 million and was believed to be the most profitable train in the world.
• Also in 1928, Erwin "Cannon Ball" Baker, who eventually became the first commissioner of NASCAR, raced the 20th Century Limited from New York to Chicago in an automobile, beating the train.
• In 1938 industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss was commissioned by the New York Central to design the streamlined train sets in Art Deco style, with the locomotive and passenger cars rendered in blues and grays (the colors of the New York Central). The streamlined sets were inaugurated on June 15, 1938. His design was probably the most famous American passenger train of all time

Source: Wikipedia