What, You Knave!

tomorrow is a new day and we’ll approach it together

In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”

thinking about coptic mummy paintings and weeping

Exactly! These portraits fascinates me so much because they were painted 2000 years ago, but you could just walk in almost any street today and you will surely meet someone who looks as though they had stepped straight out of one of them.. hundreds of realistic portraits of people who looked like they are your neighbors, walked on this land we now walk on.. but they actually lived a life that does not resemble ours and spoke a different language and had different traditions and knowledge and struggles..

my favorite comprehensible math fact is that 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32... all the way on, forever, equals exactly 2. and i love it because it sounds totally mystical and then you see the proof for it and its just like a little drawing that makes you go, oh, right, duh. like all you need is a square that you have decided has an area of 2, and then you just start coloring in.