Oh, Trader Joe-san, why must your wasabi peas taste so good? I once ate so many wasabi peas that I couldn’t taste anything for three days. True story. I guess you can say that I OPed. Ha!
Monthly Archives: November 2012
I’m building a house!
I recently bought a house that was foreclosed on over two years ago for pretty darn cheap. Like cost of the land cheap. Yay, me!
As you can imagine, the house wasn’t in the best of shape, but I still had hopes that I’d be able to renovate it and turn it into a livable abode. It turns out that, while I could have done that, with the renovations that were necessary, it’d cost only a little bit more to tear the sucker down and build new. So that’s what I’m doing.
I’ll be blogging about the progress here under the category of ‘Housing’. So those of you who are thinking about buying/building your own house can learn something about the process. It’s going to be slow going for a while since winter will quickly be upon us and I’m still coming up with a design. I’ll fill the time in between now and construction with my travails so far. And let me tell you, nothing in my life has caused so much anxiety as this house has. Stay tuned!
A note about statistics
There is a lot of brouhaha about pollsters (most notably Nate Silver) predicting an Obama win in the coming election. As of this post, Nate has the chance of Obama winning at 83%. Various news personalities are complaining that Nate must be in the bag for Obama to dare predict that Obama will win and that a Romney victory will prove that Nate Silver is a lying liar who lies. A Romney victory would prove nothing of the sort, though.
Why? Nate Silver has been eerily accurate at predicting electoral outcomes. He has a model that he follows and he is mostly public about his methods. His methods haven’t changed and they predict an over 80% chance of Obama winning. Does that mean Obama will win? No. Romney still has a 20% chance of winning. If you were to bet on the outcome, though, you’d be wise to put your money on Obama.
Look at it this way. Take a 10-sided die. What? You don’t have a 10-sided die? Ok, go back in time and play Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. Poof, you now have a 10-sided die. Pretend that an Obama win is represented by 1-8 and Romney is represented by 9-10. Roll the die. There’s an 80% chance you’d roll an Obama. Roll it a couple of times. Most of the time, you’ll roll a Romney in only a few rolls. If there could be two elections, there is a 36% chance of rolling a Romney one of those times: 2/10 + (2/10 * 8/10). A third election would give you a 49% chance of rolling at least one Romney: 2/10 + (2/10 * 8/10) + (2/10 * 64/100). Generally, you have a 1 – (8/10)^n chance of rolling a Romney in n rolls.
Of course, this is all just a useless exercise in math and probability because there is only one election and Obama currently has an 83% chance of winning according to the polls. But don’t go attacking Nate Silver or math if the die rolls a 9 or a 10.