I learned on Friday that the BIPM, the international organization in charge of The Metric System™, recently approved four new prefixes: quetta (Q) for 10^30, ronna (R) for 10^27, ronto (r) for 10^-27, and quecto (q) for 10^-30.
Cue jokes about inflation leading to rontoburgers…
Link (PDF) straight from the BIPM:
https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/64811223/Resolutions-2022.pdf
Ha ! I only just found that out (from a quiz in Radio Times !)
Deal today: two rontoburgers for 1 quettadollar.
Same place I found out (van Gogh in Brixton, we’re talking about here).
I regret to say that Mrs T said “van Gogh, of course,” before I could even read her the multiple choice options.
j
BTW - thanks for not knowing. It makes me feel slightly better about myself.
How long until they’re Wordle words?
Inside the Actor’s Studio host James Lipton was married to Kedaki Turner, who was the model for Miss Scarlet in the board game Clue.
Someone needs to correct IMDb, because her name is spelled Kedakai.
It’s in Civilization VI as an AI-controlled city-state.
Browsing Reddit today, I stumbled on an explanation of the Monty Hall problem that, finally, makes the whole thing make perfect sense:
That’s the same explanation everyone gives - nothing new. And in fact I think it is wrong. Think of it this way. The explanation still has people questioning it because it would still be a 1/2 chance you picked according to their logic. If they show a goat behind door C then flip a coin and it is a 50/50 shot between doors A and B.
The best explanation I’ve seen was the idea that the host has two choices as to the door they can pick to open. It basically boils down to this:
You choose door B. IF the car is behind door A the host chooses door C. IF the car is behind Door C the host chooses door A. The difference is that the host’s choice is not random if the car is behind a door you did not choose. So the idea is that there is one possibility the car is behind the door you choose and two possibilities the car is behind the door you didn’t choose. The opening of the goat-door is a red herring. Because of the host’s knowledge the second choice is really between the door you did choose and a door you didn’t choose which has odds of 1:2
It was new to me.
That makes significantly less sense to me than the one I posted.
Maybe, but I would argue it is more correct.
If you say so.
I’ve been using the “imagine 100 doors” thing forever when explaining it. I think I got it from the Marilyn Vos Savant column when I was a kid.
I would consider the goat a decent prize. I have a car but I don’t have a goat.
I may be biased here, a friend of mine farms free range pigs nearby, and he has a very tame goat and her kid, plus two sheep, who are all basically pets. Protected by a lovely Anatolian Shepherd Dog. They follow the farmer around as he tends to the pigs.
On the original Let’s Make a Deal show, did the people who won a goat actually get to take it home? I imagine most people would say no thanks if they were offered the option, but a few might have happy to get a free goat. The show probably would have gotten in trouble if they told someone on-air that they won a goat but refused to give it to them if they wanted it.
And, yeah, I find the 100 doors variant the easiest way to understand the solution.
Today i learnt that the great jazz bassisit and band leader Charles Mingus
wrote a book (well, more of a pamphlet) about … toilet training a cat !
Seeing that Michael J. Fox won a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (Oscar) reminded me that Jean Hersholt was Leslie Nielsen’s half-uncle.
December 6, 1957: the US attempts to launch its first artificial satellite from Cape Canaveral, in response to the Soviet launch of “Sputnik” a couple of months earlier. The rocket lifted a couple of feet off the ground; then toppled over and exploded.
Meanwhile - the satellite survived and kept sending out its beeping signals.
Newspapers called it “Kaputnik” or “Sputternik”. It would be March, 1958 before a successful launch.
MAD magazine, nearly seven years later: