Happy Days in Random Chatter 10

[Marduk]

Yeah, same here, DL.

[thatonemom]

I love the Olympics. Every night I want to try a new winter sport.

[Tally M.]

Did you know that sometimes asking a guy out can turn out really well?

Seriously. Things seem to be working out quite nicely with one of the four that I asked out.

[UffishThought]

Trying to update my resume and maybe work up a cover letter. Man I hate this part.

[mic0]

Trying to update my resume and maybe work up a cover letter. Man I hate this part.

The cover letter is the worst part, IMO! If you need someone to look at your resume, I'd be happy to. I've had a draft of a cover letter for about three days, and I keep going back to it and slowly editing... I hope they don't close the job application before I finish.

[Portia]

I'd also like to put myself out there as a willing cover letter editor. Just got my long-time BFF a job, so I have bona fides.

[UffishThought]

I may will take you both up on that, thanks! I've never actually done a cover letter before, and it's a general one I just upload to the district website, so I can't get all specific about the positions I want.

[Portia]

Well, for those who have been following the saga, my brother is coming home from his mission. I've gone into full-on crisis management mode, which I'm actually pretty good at: looking up links for registration, counseling, and housing.

I'd much rather manage someone else's problems than mine. I think that this will give me an impetus for an exit strategy. My best friend considers himself Unitarian now, both my (-ish) boyfriend and not-boyfriend are atheists, and my heart hasn't been in it for months.

I'm pleasantly surprised at how relatively well my father and grandmother are taking it. Now for damage control among the ward gossips. (Although I actually don't care what they think.)

[Katya]

Well, for those who have been following the saga, my brother is coming home from his mission. I've gone into full-on crisis management mode, which I'm actually pretty good at: looking up links for registration, counseling, and housing.

Poor kid. I hope that coming home is the start of things getting better for him.

[Portia]

Well, for those who have been following the saga, my brother is coming home from his mission. I've gone into full-on crisis management mode, which I'm actually pretty good at: looking up links for registration, counseling, and housing.

Poor kid. I hope that coming home is the start of things getting better for him.

Thank you. Me too.

[Portia]

So I'm playing a game which relies on shuffling your music. I have 589 songs in this player, 100 of which are by Tchaikovsky. I'm on song number 5, and this is the 4th by him, which surprised me, and I consider myself to have a good grasp on the law of large numbers. Anyone care to do back of the envelope calculations to see how likely this was to happen?

[Marduk]

My really quick and heavily rounded math says about 1 in 300.

[S.A.M.]

Something like:

approximate odds of one Tchaikovsky - 100 in 600 or 1 in 6 or .17
two, two Tchaikovsky - 1/6 * 1/6 or .03
three, three Tchaikovsky 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 or .005
four, four Tchaikovsky mwahaha - 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 or .0008
four, four Tchaikovsky mwahaha and one not - 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 5/6 or .0006

Estimate about one in 1700 unless shuffle doesn't allow repeats of the same song within a certain number.

[Yellow]

But S.A.M, that's the probability of getting 4 Tchaikovksy and then 1 non-Tchaikovsky, in that order. Surely allowing order switching changes things up, right?

(In the following example, "T" means a Tchaikovsky, and "N" means not)

TTTTN = 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 5/6 = .0006
TTTNT = 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 5/6 * 1/6 = .0006
TTNTT = 1/6 * 1/6 * 5/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 = .0006
TNTTT = 1/6 * 5/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 = .0006
NTTTT = 5/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 = .0006

There is no overlap between these cases, so probability of any of them happening would be the sum of those probabilities.

5 * .0006 ≈ 0.0032, which is roughly 1 in every 333 plays of 5 songs.

[Yellow]

If you want to allow having 5 Tchaikovskies in a row, you'd add (⅙)^5, which adds 0.000128600823045, not appreciably changing the odds in any significant way.

[Portia]

Editor's Choice™

[Marduk]

I'm just happy the math I did in my head came out so close. Actually, I followed the same pattern as Yellow, just never using decimals.

So each of the five results means 5/7776, and then *5. 7776/25 is 311, which I rounded to 300.

[Yellow]

Yeah, using fractions would actually be more accurate than using my highly truncated decimals, but as we're both rounding either way, let's just say that ~300 is the right ballpark.

[S.A.M.]

Fun!

[mic0]

I haven't listened to their music yet, but apparently a bunch of published writers made a band called Rock Bottom Remainders. Some pretty great writers in there! I got there because I was looking up Barbara Kingsolver (I'm reading one of her books), and she apparently went to college to play classical piano originally before changing to biology. And in the 90s, she and a bunch of writers made this band.