How I spent New Year's Eve day
New Year's Eve was spent quietly, with the family: the kids actually managed to stay awake until midnight -- even B2, who usually wanders off and falls asleep before everyone else.
But the day of New Year's Eve, I spent puttering about with a "marble maze" kit -- or rather, three of them combined -- experimenting with binomial distributions.
Because, you know -- that's what you do on vacation.
Note that I make some comments in there that alludes to OCD-ness. If I was **truly** OCD, then I would've done more than five iterations. ;)
--GG
Labels: geeky, my traits, statistics
posted by Gye Greene @ 10:23 PM
3 Comments:
Which spreadsheet program did you use? Thus showing my proclivity for all things tech (not that it matters, just my geekyness). It was blurry, thus actually *increasing* my interest in the answer.
The wife was curious about the experiment itself, as to what it actually represents. I failed (more or less) in explaining it (distribution of traits across a population, etc). But still nifty!
Spreadsheet: As you know, I'm running Linux. So on my previous machine (also Linux) it was OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet (Calc). But for this one, it was the productivity suite that came with Mint Linux 17, which is LibreOffice (but the spreadsheet component is **also** named "Calc"). :)
re: the experiment -- it's just statistics-based geekiness. But again, imagine having eight coins, flipping them all at once, writing down how many "heads" and how many "tails" -- and than tallying the results after 20-30 tries.
You would probably find that "half heads, half tails" is the most typical result -- but you would **occassionlly** come up with "all eight as heads" or "all eight as tails". Improbable -- but occassionally happening.
My experiment was just a small version of this -- http://youtu.be/wUgQtXEodf0 -- really. :)
Basically (as said in the description in the YouTube video I just linked to) -- just trying to see if what we were told in statistics class actually holds true.
--GG
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