Credit where credit is due
I say a lot of harsh things about local "media". On the rare occasions when something good appears, I like to make a special note. This column on the KHQ website, by their webmaster Cory Howard, is DAMN GOOD humor. Better than any national "humor" I've read lately.

He lists and discusses the odds of winning the big lottery, vs lots of other good and bad things. Cleverly done and well written.

A couple of the odds numbers are incorrect by 'Bayesian' standards... EG the odds of winning an Oscar is listed as 1/11,500. That's clearly the chance for people who are working actors, not for everyone. Sharkbite (1/11 million) is wrong the other way. If you never swim in the ocean, your chance is exactly zero. Among the few thousand people who regularly swim in the ocean, the shark chance is tremendously higher than 11 million, probably closer to 1/100.

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Unrelated note on media and probability....

I enjoy half-listening to the Chartists on the local money-talk station. Pure spectator sport, since I don't gamble in ANY casino.

Some of the Chartists have adopted the Rush-based talk radio style, with bump music and slogans and standard Gotchas; others are unscripted and casual, more like a conversation between engineers or programmers. I prefer the latter.

The two styles have two things in common.

(1) Charting is a vivid and colorful set of named patterns. Gartleys, Leg Ds, Butterflies, Three Black Crows, and so on. Math teachers should learn from this and add PERSONALITY to formulas. There'd be a lot less 'math anxiety' and a hell of a lot more learning if math ed made more use of the natural human talent for pattern recognition and naming. Fuck abstraction and generality.

(2) For obvious legal reasons, none of the Chartists give specific advice. When a caller asks about buying XYZWBTTRsub9.2, the Chartist will consult his charts and say something like "Okay, this is a 3-times negative direction share, based on the geometric ratio of the rate of change in platinum prices to a 0.47-weighted index of top-100 hedge fund expressed shorts on Mali franc - Polish zloty forex futures. Looks like it will diverge from its 15-hour Gartley at 237.1984236, so judge accordingly." The caller understands, and seems happy with the conditional judgment. [I'm probably stretching this just a little bit, but that's how it sounds to me.]

Today one of the Chartists violated rule 2 in a dramatic and all-consuming way. At the end of his hour, he said flatly and clearly: "If you're not in the market, stay out. If you're in, get out or put a stop order on everything."

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 1:35 PM