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Nov 23, 2011

The Show Notes

The Artist
Intro
The Hotel Bethlehem
Rupert McClanahan’s Indestructible Bastards
     
- Simo Häyhä
Checking Wiki
Mortimer calls in again once more, as well as again
Captivating True Stories from The Adventures of PFA

     - Very random
Woody Allen’s typewriter
Religious Moron of the Week
     - Billy E. Hyatt from Bill Dowling
Has it really been a year since Australia?
Cool PFA gig on Black Friday. You should come.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Show close

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Mentioned in the Show

Accommodations for the IceHouse Concert

Hotel Bethlehem
800-607-BETH
800-607-2384

promo code: Geologic

A Gneiss Night Out
The IceHouse Geologic Concert
21812

The Official 21812 Ticket Site

Philadelphia Funk Authority

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Geo's Music: stock up!

The catalog at iTunes

The catalog at CD Baby

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Sign up for the mailing list: Write to Geo!

A reminder that the new portal to the Geologic Universe is at GeorgeHrab.com.

Score more data from the Geologic Universe! Get George's Non-Coloring Book at Lulu, both as and E-BOOK and PRINT editions.

Check out Geo's wiki page thanks to Tim Farley.

Get your George HrApp here. Thanks to Gerry Orkin for the design and engineering.

Have a comment on the show, a Religious Moron tip, or a question for Ask George? Drop George a line and write to Geo's Mom, too!

Ms. Info sez, "OMIGOSH YOU GUYS- HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS! However as of November 23rd, we're waiting for the room block to go live. Should be November 28th, 29th at the latest. Maybe Friday, the 25th. We'll keep you posted."


Fred
over twelve years ago

I just saw this post about random numbers and thought I'd pass it along:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/124233/why-is-it-impossible-to-produce-truly-random-numbers

Gerry
twelve and a half years ago

George, i wonder if, in one of your picks in the "Very Random" segment, if you included your bit of "half a window"? i get the feeling it would've been relevant to that little exercise you guys did.

jaranath
twelve and a half years ago

Uh-oh. I'd be careful, Geo. They don't call him the Bad Astronomer for nothing. I heard this one night he showed a man in Pueblo the Medusa Nebula, just to watch him petrify.

TC
twelve and a half years ago

About the randomness issue: I took a statistics course in college a few years ago, so here go (goes?) my two cents.

Random numbers/events which occur with the same probability are called uniformly random (which most people consider "truly random"). Non-uniform randomness would still be random, but skewed. For instance, if 100 decimal fractions are generated (by a computer) between 0 and 1 (such as 0.38256 etc) and they are all multiplied with each other so that we get 10,000 multiplication products, those 10,000 values will no longer be uniformly random, but still random. The average of the 100 numbers would be at 0.5, but the average of the 10,000 values is at 0.25, so roughly 5000 of the 10,000 numbers would be less than 1/4, which no longer counts as "truly random" to a lay person, but is still technically random. The Wikipedia page about non-uniform random number generators is titled "Pseudo-random number sampling", although that page probably won't tell you very much.

Two more things:

1. Look up "German tank problem" on Wikipedia, it's fascinating in a geeky way and shows that dry, boring math like this can be very useful.

2. If we truly randomly pick a number from 1 to 10,000 (perhaps during a raffle) and it turns out to be 3 or 998 or 500, that number is still truly random, just as likely as 361 or 814, but we dismiss it as being artificial or not really random, and probably pick a new one thereby ensuring that our choice is not really random because the numbers 1 or 10,000 have a lower chance of being accepted. Humans aren't very good random number generators.