Humodour

To be fair, a lot of mathematicians and statisticians are utterly clueless when it comes to the Monty Hall problem/fallacy. It's awesome.

Good point. I lived in a house with actors and actresses many years ago, and they were ALL wankers. the actors and actresses we has met is, without exception... difficult. we has actual been friends with a few actors/actresses, but am gonna note that we thought they was all damaged or nutty to a lesser or greater degree. not wankers (some were very nice people) but all was kookie. HA! Good Fun! Rather than actors having various levels of mental instability as you suggest, it's far more likely that the common traits of the personalities acting attracts (extroversion, whimsy, impulsivity, driven by intuition and thirst for new experiences) are simply alien to you by virtue of being antipodal to your own personality traits (which would at a guess be introversion, fastidity, compulsion and a conservative approach to problem solving). your not-so-clever attempt to get around tigs warning aside It helps when my post is actually serious and your characterisation of actors and artists as mentally unstable seems genuinely unfair. Perhaps you were simply being facetious. Whatever.

You can pretty much count anybody who did analysis or abstract algebra at uni to be a basic mathematician mate. Aybody who has passed those subjects possess a mathemtical brain and is worth listening to when it comes to discussions of logic or statistics as they have had to formally and rigourously prove a vast number of theorems from scratch.

Good point. I lived in a house with actors and actresses many years ago, and they were ALL wankers. the actors and actresses we has met is, without exception... difficult. we has actual been friends with a few actors/actresses, but am gonna note that we thought they was all damaged or nutty to a lesser or greater degree. not wankers (some were very nice people) but all was kookie. HA! Good Fun! Rather than actors having various levels of mental instability as you suggest, it's far more likely that the common traits of the personalities acting attracts (extroversion, whimsy, impulsivity, driven by intuition and thirst for new experiences) are simply alien to you by virtue of being antipodal to your own personality traits (which would at a guess be introversion, fastidity, compulsion and a conservative approach to problem solving).

"He could go to an industry that makes more money. Ball bearings

You don't understand probability. There's a bunch of mathematicians on this forum, as well many who took maths subjects at university. Please, please, please believe us when we say that you are simply incorrect, even if you still don't understand why. The notion that somebody would go around wilfully believing that events with small likelihoods of occuring are actually impossible is almost physically painful to me.

I was first in my college probabilty class. Of course you were. I'll bet that college also taught creationism as a core component of its biology degrees. No, it was the university that invented nano-technology. No university 'invented' nanotechnology. Feynman described the new science of nanotech in his awesome speech "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" - go read it everyone! He is the father of nanotech, not any university research group. I also take issue with the notion that nanotechnology was 'invented'. Nature (as in evolution) has been practicing it for millions of years. You believe a person can win the lottery once, yes? A small chance, but it exists. Once they've won it once, their chances of wining it again are the same as anybody else's. So they might win again. That would mean they've won 2 times. Fine, right? Once they've won 2 times, their chances of winning again are still the same as anybody else's. So they COULD win 3 times. And the same way, they could win 4. If you believe a person can win the lottery once, to be logically consistent you should believe they can win the lottery 4 times. Of course if all you're saying is "cool, that's amazingly good luck" not "it's impossible - it must be a supernatural force", then yeah, I agree.

This post reminds me of people knocking good movies because they're "cliche". Two points: a) if it ain't broke, don't fix it b) when you've done as much music for as many games a Soule has, it's hard to avoid repeating yourself, especially considering that music for games is as much order and logic as it is art - you need to compose your music to match the environment, atmosphere, and combat/plot pace. Given how similar most games are it's no wonder he's formulaic.

Crap, I spelt googol incorrectly. Damn you Google for bastardising the spelling of your namesake. Edit: Look at it this way Wrath - events with very very very small chances of occuring happen all the time. For most of those events, they do not occur. But because so many of them happen daily, you're bound to find some that do occur. Winning the lottery 4 times in a row is one such event. Although in this case the gambler's fallacy should be kept in mind: once she's won the lottery 3 times in a row, her chance of winning it a 4th time is actually the same as anybody else's - very low, but SOMEBODY has to win it and her odds are as good as anybody's. There is no cosmic censor saying "you've already won it 3 times before, you can't win it a 4th time".

Wrath, let me just point out to you that in mathematics (of which statistics is a subset), an infinitesimal is a different value to a very small number. Indeed, in order to consider calculus the old fashion way (as Leibniz and Newton did - instead of the modern limit method) one must actually extend the number system to include such infinitesimal values - this is called the Hyperreal field. My point is that infinitesimal numbers are not normal numbers. They do not have finite values as 1/google or 1/1000000000000 do. 1/google is a very very very small number. But it is a number in the Reals, and a chance of 1/google still has a very real (heh) possibility of happening. That is to say: if an event A with a probability of 1/google happened, no mathematician or statistician with any intelligence would be remotely surprised (especially if event A is repeated many times over large time intervals, as in the evolution of life for example). Put simply: infinitesimals are the inverses of infinities. This is a far more elegant way of understanding why infinitesimals are not normal numbers.

I was first in my college probabilty class. Of course you were. I'll bet that college also taught creationism as a core component of its biology degrees.

lol @ watching Wrath's poor understanding of mathematical logic get torn to shreds. Now where's the popcorn...

*facepalm* And this is why we have religion.

Correct. Which is why it's no surprise that Dungeon Siege's music is awesome. That said, DS1's music had more flare than DS2's.

The Dungeon Siege 1 soundtrack was absolutely amazing, so...

I here they've set up a nanotechnology research centre called "Grey Google".

I like actors. At least the kind who go to uni here. Maybe not the Hollywood kind.

It's the middle of winter but the past week has been a nice 13 Celsius or so all day. It's quite nice.

So all the stars with drug addictions, dead by overdose, or anorexia are not proof enough. I don't think they're proof of anything. Lots of non-stars have drug addictions, die of overdose, or have anorexia. Would you consider those non-stars addicts as having normal lives? There is a problem if these people who had no previous history of substance abuse gravitate towards it to deal with their issues, what's worse the drugs are readily available to them. Sure, there are a lot of non-star addicts but they are spread out trough the world and their reason for consumption are personal. To see so many people do that around a single place can't be just attributed to them, the environment has an effect on people. Much like if a wrongly convicted felon might turn into an actual felon inside prison, stars react to Hollywood. Does anybody know what Orogun is going on about?

So all the stars with drug addictions, dead by overdose, or anorexia are not proof enough. I don't think they're proof of anything. Lots of non-stars have drug addictions, die of overdose, or have anorexia.

I don't know what was deleted (seems like the stuff about hash). Is linking to Wikipedia is acceptable? On the topic of hash - one of the reasons I'd rejoice in legalisation is that marijuana extracts would be legal to buy (they're difficult to make and consume large amounts of expensive material). With marijuana extracts oral consumption becomes readily available, rather than smoking, which obviously has clear benefits to one's lungs. Oral consumption of drugs also tends to be kinder on the brain, and less addictive (psychologically in this case) due to lasting longer and thus less redosing.

Elegant solution to a deeply complex problem.

Excellent point. Tom Cruise has some very bizarre opinions, but he seems like a generally well-intentioned guy. Mel Gibson seems to be an intolerant bigot. But he made BraveHeart! Despite everything the man can still make good movies and that's all that matters. At least until he really goes gun-ho, then we'll have the next big Hollywood tragedy and "True Hollywood story" special. Gah this country is sick He's a **** and a bastard. He doesn't deserve your respect or custom.

Guys, would it help if we played LAN instead? No CD-keys required that way. BTW, if we do play on Battle.net, I've ditched Europe. Lag there is between 500 and 1000ms. USwest is 250ms.

Interesting article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/google-se...h-google-games/