Continuing my mild obsession with Michael Jackson’s face:

If he goes to jail, how many weeks could he possibly survive?

[Technorati tag: MichaelJackson]

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Garry.tv has a Half Life 2 mod that lets you use the game’s astounding physics engine and its existing objects to build Rube Goldberg-like machines, pose rag dolls, etc. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks amazing. [Technorati tags: halflife2 mods]

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My son and I spent a little time this afternoon on the Monty Hall paradox, a topic we’d discussed a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it takes me 20 minutes to understand the explanation, and I only understand it for 4 continuous seconds.

Here’s the situation. You are asked to pick one of three doors. Donkeys are behind two of them, and a new car is behind another. After you choose your door, but before it’s revealed to you, Monty Hall (the emcee) opens one of the doors you didn’t choose and reveals a donkey. He then asks if you’d like to switch from your initial choice to the remaining door. It turns out that if you agree to switch, you double (?) your chance of winning.

It just doesn’t seem possible. Here’s how one site, that has a simulator on it, explains it:

The easiest way to explain this to students is as follows. The probability of picking the wrong door in the initial stage of the game is 2/3. If the contestant picks the wrong door initially, the host must reveal the remaining empty door in the second stage of the game. Thus, if the contestant switches after picking the wrong door initially, the contestant will win the prize. The probability of winning by switching then reduces to the probability of picking the wrong door in the initial stage which is clearly 2/3.

Despite a very clear explanation of this paradox, most students have a difficulty understanding the problem…

Yeah, that was real clear. Oh yeah.

The only explanation that’s ever worked for me is the 1,000 door variation, which you can find here. And here’s the front page NY Times story about it.

Now please don’t bring this up for another two years. It’s given me a headache. [Technorati tags: paradox puzzle]

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Deadwood has become a self-parody at the very beginning of its second year, beating the previous record holder — 24 — by 4 episodes.

Someone apparently told David Milch, the show’s creator and writer, that he’s brilliant at dialogue because everyone now speaks like a lead character in a Shakespearean drama, except for the poetry, and half the time I don’t have any fucking idea what the fuck they’re fucking talking fucking about.

I find the show painful to watch and have only managed this far by thinking that maybe someone will remember that dialogue is supposed to: A. Express differentiated character, B. Advance narrative, C. Not be howlingly pretentious.

Meanwhile, Project Greenlight has become as delicious and difficult to watch as Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Office is better than I’d thought but isn’t as deliciously horrible as the British version because Steven Carrell hasn’t yet located the odious little man behind the odious outer man. Arrested Development I’m finding funny despite its determination to be whacky. Likewise for Scrubs.

Yes, I watch TV and I’m proud of it.

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My wife and I have been catching up on TiVo’ed West Wings and the pattern seems obvious: The ones on the campaign trail are good while the ones inside the White House suck. The cause seems just as obvious: Without the natural drama of a campaign, the writers are at a loss.

AdamAaron Sorkin’s genius was his ability to create compelling scripts out of two elements that traditionally are drama-free: a group of people who like one another and political issues/ideas. The new writers have fragmented the group and are relying on ridiculous plot twists: CJ’s elevation to chief of staff was totally arbitrary, and the national security advisor is now being given a cloak and dagger backstory that shows the producers think we viewers can’t appreciate a well-drawn character unless she’s killed someone.

I hope West Wing continues with Santos as president and with a whole new cast, except for maybe Josh and Charlie. If within a year they can’t figure out how to make the west wing of the White House interesting, then I’m switching to Joey. [Technorati tag: WestWing]

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Enter a mathematical expression into Google and it will return the results. E.g., if you enter “1+2” (no quotes), it will tell you the answer is 3. Enter “half a cup in teaspoons” and it tells you that that’s 24 US teaspoons.

So, the lunatic journal, WordWays (I’m a long-time subscriber and love it) writes briefly about Eric Iverson’s attempt to see “which alphabetic phrase without any repreating letters generated the largest and smallest number.” Why? For that we’d need a psychiatrist and a pick axe. But who cares? Eric has found that the smallest is

and the largest is

I am so not tempted to outdo Eric.

WordWays — “The Journal of Recreational Linguistics” — continues to get harder to read thanks to computers. A typical article treats words as collections of letters and tries to find ones that meet some odd constraint. Typical articles used to be about word pyramids and hyphenated words whose letters immediately before and after the hyphen cover every possible pairing. But now that word lists are computerized, the best of the WordWaysians have to come up with challenges that would not only stump a human but come close to stumping computers. I often can’t figure out what the hell the challenge is. For example, Simon Norton has an article wondering if all words can be expressed as sumagrams. Here’s the second paragraph:

This is what is called a free abelian group, where the second word derives from the name opf the Norwegian mathematician Abel. The elements of this group are sequences of (upper case) letters and antiletters…

Some I can follow, though. Eric Iverson, for example, publishes a list of words made only with letters with diagonals in them, from akavit to zanza. He finishes with a list of the longest words without any diagonal letters, starting with bioelectricities. And Darryl Francis lists all 300 tube stations in London and tries to find something interesting about their names. For example, did you know that Bond Street transadds to deobstruent and sober-tinted? I didn’t!

In the current issue, there’s also an article by Will Nediger speculating that Douglas Adams took his fascination with the number 42 from Lewis Carroll. And my son and I particularly enjoyed Fender Tucker’s list of 11 heterograms placed in perfectly ambiguous sentences, such as:

After breaking into the Sherriff of Nottingham’s armory, the flamboyant actor/thief Robin Hood took a bow.

Unfortunately, WordWays has a minimal Web presence — some samples and an opportunity to subscribe. It’s just about tailor-made for living on line. [Technorati tag: wordways ]

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Johnny Carson apparently thinks of five new jokes every time he reads the paper and is frustrated that he doesn’t have a stage on which to perform them.

Blog, Johnny, blog!

Technorati tags: carson

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ThereIsNoCrisis is a social security resource worth noting. It maintains — guess what? — that the Bush administration is trumping up the Social Security crisis.

Metaphilm has a bunch of whacky film interpretations. For example, did you know that in The Fight Club, Edward Norton plays grown-up Calvin and Brad Pitt plays grown-up Hobbes?

Rebecca Mackinnon has posted an excellent FAQ about the conference on blogging, journalism and credbiility being put on by Berkman, American Library Association and the Shorenstein Center. Bonus: A photo at the bottom of Berkman Fellows eating a kitten for breakfast. (Very funny comments on the Kitten Breakfast at EthicallyChallenged.)

Technorati tags: social security, metaphilm, berkman

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There’s an article, by Joseph P. Kahn, with lots of fun facts about Tom and Ray, the Car Talk guys, in today’s Boston Globe. Here’s a snippet I enjoyed:

Targets of the show’s humor sometimes fire back. After Tom made a crack on-air about a tailgate problem the Dodge Caravan was having, suggesting in his usual irreverent manner that Chrysler Corp. had “paid off” investigators to forestall a recall, a highly unamused Chrysler representative demanded a public correction and got one — sort of.

Tom did correct the record during a subsequent show, saying something to the effect that no money had actually changed hands and that Caravan passengers were only being ejected through the back doors of moving vehicles, not the sunroofs and side doors as he might have mistakenly said.

Also:

Ray: “One of the big [automotive repair] chains approached us, but we didn’t want to stand in front of their store and tell people to get their cars fixed there. We couldn’t. Because they [expletive] everybody.

Car Talk is the most widely-heard show on NPR. And here’s a hint: If you tell an NPR producer that you have an idea for a new program, she’s highly likely to reply, “Yeah, it’s Car Talk for what?”, as in Car Talk for computers, Car Talk for health, Car Talk for ventriloquists…

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I woke up last night and couldn’t fall back to sleep, leading me to be able to declare with some authority that “Cult of the Damned” is the worst movie ever made.

But this is an honor it shares we several other films, including “Head,” starring the Monkees and written by Jack Nicholson. In fact, there’s a cluster of bad films made in the 60s and embodying the 60s ethos. No surprise, for the properties of that epoch — a drug-assisted sense of humor that insisted that any random juxtaposition must be funny, an unshakable belief in one’s own profundity, and a belief that talent and craft are forms of despicable elitism — are just what’s required to make truly awful movies.

The only other period in living memory so productive of bad movies was the late 70s when fear and patriotism led to a spate of stupid, predictable, jingoistic macho movies. Then, of course, the streams crossed and we got the two worst successful movies in history: “Platoon” and “Dances with Wolves.” But I’d rather not discuss them. They’re still too painful to contemplate.

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