a friend tells me his wife's thanksgiving tradition

When I was growing up, I attended an orthodox yeshiva. Not a black hatter type place, but Orthodox. There were a bunch of nonorthodox families whose kids went there. Every year the question would come up: Is it OK for Jews to celebrate Thanksgiving.

It seems like an odd question. But we were taught not to celebrate other religions' religious holidays. Thanksgiving isn't another religion's holiday, but it's not a Jewish holiday either. The answer was generally along the lines of "What could be better than devoting a day to being thankful.

But in some more religious circles, they don't make a big deal of Thanksgiving. It's not so much that they are against it, as that they don't do it. I suspect part of it may be that it's Thursday night. Since many Orthodox families have a big dinner on Friday night for the Sabbath. Having two nights of big meals in a row may be a bit much.

For some reason, I was curious about what my Orthodox colleagues do. So I asked one of them by IM. Here's how the exchange went:
 Me: Does your family celebrate Thanksgiving?

Colleague: Every day.

Me: Touche.

Colleague: Seriously. The first words out of our mouths when our eyes open in the morning are "Modeh ani."* Later we say Psalm 100**, as well as the Modim*** blessing three times a day. Every day. Brochos**** before and after eating -- every single meal.

Me: Yes. I understand. Does your family do anything special on the last***** Thursday of  November that many people in the US would associate with the national holiday, "Thanksgiving"?

Colleague: Turkey and extended family get together -- no, although I have done so in my life. But my wife attends communal gatherings at the mall the next day.



*"I give thanks"
** The Psalm of Gratitude
*** a specifc prayer of gratitude that's part of the thrice-daily prayers
**** prayers. In this case, he is referring to the simple prayer of thanks before the meal and the longer Grace after meals.
***** Yeah, you got me. I should have said "fourth Thursday"

is there a glitch in trivia crack?

I don't know if anyone here is interested in Trivia Crack. I am. It has become my main smartphone-based time-waster.

Anyway, I've been noticing recently that the first choice seems to be correct more often than would be expected by raw chance. By way of background, for anyone who doesn't, and hasn't, played T-Crack, questions come with four choices.
Now, sometimes such perceptions can be off. So I decided to do a little checking. I will track how many times the right choice comes up in each of the four positions. To be clear, I will not always track this. If I'm on the bus without pen and paper, I don't want that to keep me from playing. But what I will do is explicitly decide, before the fact, that I will track results for a particular session. Put another way, I won't decide, after playing, that I will track the results for questions already asked. Doing that would introduce the possibility of me subconsciously biasing the results.
But if I only include results that come after I have made the explicit decision to track what happens in a particular session, and if I always include the results once I have made the decision, that should eliminate the possibility of self-deception.
So far, I have done this twice, for two games. My results are summarized in the table. In the two games I played, I had 39 questions. Of those, the first choice was correct 23 times. That's more than half.Now, I am not sure how significant 39 questions is as a sample size. But I think this is suggestive. Remember -- it's not as if I played these games, realized that the first choice was correct a lot and then saved the results. I decided before playing that I would track the results because I suspected that the first choice would come up a lot.
I will report back after I have a larger sample. I don't know that keeping the split by category matters, though it will be interesting to see if I can notice a difference. Right now, what I have does not suggest anything. At least not to me. But I realize I don't have enough enough data to make any strong conclusions.
If anyone else plays T-Crack, I'd be curious to know if you're seeing the same thing. Also, what platform you play on -- if this is some glitch in the software I wonder if it's unique to Android (my platform) or if it's a cross-platform issue.
Perhaps I shouldn't post this. If there is a glitch, then knowing that fact gives me a competitive advantage over those who don't know. Posting this makes it more likely that others will know, and more likely that it will get fixed.
So, just consider that I am possibly sacrificing my T-Crack performance in the name of science. Or whatever.

you're just a bayesian

I was discussing probability with a colleague, and the conversation reminded me of an incident in college.

For the purpose of this narrative, I will present a lot of verbal exchanges using quotation marks. That is just a convenience for the purposes of telling the story. Except for the final punchline, I don't remember what was said verbatim.

In a probability class, the professor was introducing us to the concept of hypothesis testing. She asked us: "If I flip a coin 100 times and it lands on heads each time, how likely is it the it's a fair coin?"

What she meant to ask -- and it was a long time before I realized this -- was, "If I have a fair coin, and flip it 100 times, how likely is it to come up heads each time."

The difference may seem subtle, but it's crucial. The answer to the question she meant to ask is (1/2)^100, which is tiny. But the question she actually asked cannot be answered without more information.

She expected a straightforward answer, but I said that it depends.

"On what?"

"On how certain you were that it was a fair coin before you started flipping it."

She insisted that that was irrelevant. It was really unlikely that I had a fair coin if I flipped it and got heads 100 times.

"If I pulled it from a drawer of coins, and I know that half -- or even 1% -- of the coins in the drawer are double-headed, sure. But what if I have absolutely perfect knowledge going in that it's a fair coin? Then, even after 100 heads in a row -- or 1000, or 10,000 -- I still know it's a fair coin."

We went back and forth for a while, restating the question and related logic. I didn't realize what she had meant to ask. And she had gotten so caught up that she didn't realize her mistake. Eventually it became clear that the discussion wasn't productive. And she had to move on with the lesson.

"Oh, you're just a Bayesian" she told me...

will lids host a convention? will i be more involved?

Today was the last Long Island Daylily Society (LIDS) meeting of the year.

Pot luck lunch, slides from a few members' gardens, door prizes. All that folderol.

But some other matters that are of interest to me.

One of the things that's been on my mind about LIDS is that I'd like to get more involved. And the opportunity may have presented itself. One fact presented is that LIDS was asked about hosting the 2018 regional convention. We, as a club, have to decide whether we want to host, and we will be making that decision by vote in the January meeting. I mentioned to Blair (and she agreed) that we should agree to host -- that we'd be foolish not to. Caught talking, I was cajoled into standing up in front of the group to share my thoughts. It was like being back in school, told to share what I said with the whole room.

So I shared. And there was some joking about how I just volunteered to run the event. Uh...yeah...

I was approached after the meeting and asked if Blair and I would be willing to work on the convention. FIrst thing, I made sure that I wasn't asked to be in charge. I've never bee to a daylily convention, and don't know what all is involved. But it looks like I'll be part of a core of people doing the work. Assuming LIDS decides to go for it...

cinema history class: a study in terror

Keith's film class in the basement continues with week two of our Sherlock Holmes session. This time it was A Study in Terror (1965), starring John Neville and Sherlock Holmes. Not counting the stupid Sherlock Holmes episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation*, this was my second exposure to the Holmes character. The first was a week prior, when Keith showed us the 1959 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles.


Short answer? I loved this film.


Study isn't a horror  movie; it's more of a crime drama/mystery. In the discussion afterwards, I said it seems to me like a krimi, though I don't really know what exactly that genre entails. Keith seemed intrigued by that observation, though he explained that the krimis typically involved criminal plots that were more complicated.


The key to why I enjoyed this movie is that it was well-paced and riveting. Like any good mystery, it had me guessing the whole time. In addition, there were some good comedic moments (including Sherlock's scene with his brother Mycroft -- who was admirably portrayed by Robert Morley). And since this was a restored version on blu-ray disc, the color was wonderful.


As an aside, I note that a lot of this movie seemed like it was right out of  Oliver! In fact, during a couple of the bar scenes I kept expecting Georgia Brown (who was playing the role of the singer) tyo start belting out "Oom-Pah-Pah" And a couple of times I thought I was looking at Bill Sikes. And, who knows? Maybe that association played a role in my enjoying the film. Oliver! is one of my favorite musicals -- the Broadway soundtrack is one of the records I associate with my childhood, and I played Fagin in my sixth grade class production. My apologies to the curious: that performance is not available on Youtube.


As I noted in a prior post, I wasn't crazy about the 1959 Hammer version of Hound of the Baskervilles, so I actually had low expectations going into this. But this helped restore my faith in the possibilities of Sherlock Holmes. Even if the character is an a-hole.


*Data, the android, had an obsession with Holmes. Data was the most annoying regular on the show (with the possible exceptions of Picard, Riker, Troi, La Forge and Wesley Crusher). But that's another matter.

why didn't the dentist lose his license?

Is anyone familiar with the appropriately named Jackass films? These films are vignettes of a crew of guys, headed by Johnny Knoxville, playing practical jokes and pranks on each other, or doing distasteful things on dares. A few examples?

• One guy ate horse manure on a dare.
• A couple guys were tricked into getting into a limousine. Once they were in, the doors were locked and bees were poured in through the moonroof.
• One guy allowed himself to be branded on the backside (with a red hot brand shaped like a penis.

 You get the idea.

These don't interest me, but I have, unfortunately, seen a bunch of these stunts and pranks. Which is a bunch more than I need. But I learned something today that has me wondering. In one incident, a member of the crew was convinced to have his tooth pulled by a Lamborghini. That is, they tied it to the back of a car and had the driver burn rubber. In order to convince him to allow this, they paid a dentist to tell him the tooth was infected and needed to be pulled.

How is that not a violation of medical ethics? How come that dentist hasn't been censured?

The relevant video is below. But it is definitely NSFL.

baseball stoopidstats: who has won their share of world series?

Ready for more baseball StoopidStats?

What last I yammered about this stuff, I was looking at the lengths of World Series droughts. That was inspired by the Cubs victory, which ended their streak of more than 100 years. And I was thinking about the Mets (my team of choice) and the fact that they haven't won in 30 years.

But although 30 years is a long time, it's not really an extraordinary drought, since there are 30 teams. With 30 teams, we can really only expect a team to win once every 30 years (on average). This led me to wonder about the Mets: Have they won their share of World Series? The answer isn't entirely obvious. There have been 54 World Series since they were enfranchised. With two wins, they've won more than 1 in 30. But for most of the time they existed, there were fewer teams.

To answer the question (and the analogous question for each other team), I came up with a statistic (which I will call a team's Wins per share ratio). The goal is to calculate how many World Series a team has won, divided by the number they would have been expected to win if wins were evenly distributed among the teams. For a given team, this statistic is taken by adding 1/Nt for all years, t that the team existed (and a World Series was played, where Nt is the number of teams existing in year t. To take a simple example, if a team has existed for six years, during which there were 30 teams, and they won 1 World Series, then their statistic is 1 / (6 / 30) = 5. This means that they have won 5 times as many World Series as their share.

The accompanying table shows the 30 existing franchises and their ratios. By way of background (for those not into MLB history), the modern World Series began in 1903, and has been played every year since then except for 1904 and 1994. For the years in that span, the number of teams was as follows:

• 16 teams through 1960
• 18 teams in 1961
• 20 teams from 1962 through 1968
• 24 teams from 1969 through 1976
• 26 teams from 1977 through 1992
• 28 teams from 1993 through 1997
• 30 teams from 1998 onward

I am not considering Federal League teams, since the FL did not participate in the World Series.

 It should come as no surprise that the Yankees sit atop the list, having won nearly five times as many World Series as their share. My Mets have won just fewer than their share.

One quick anecdote about this. When I did my first draft of these calculations, I made a mistake and had the Yankees winning 4.80 times their share. I IM'd a friend at work about it. Then when I realized I had made a mistake, I IM'd him to say it was actually 4.74. His response? "I thought 4.80 looked a little strange."

cinema history class: the hound of the baskervilles

In coming up with themes for the sessions of the cinematic history class, Keith has often taken suggestions from those of us in the class. Which makes sense, since he's -- at least to a degree - catering to us.


This past week we started a session of Sherlock Holmes movies -- it was Ethan's suggestion -- with Hammer Films' 1959 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Andre Morel, this should have been better than it was. Ethan tweeted that he enjoyed it, but it was still his least favorite Hammer film (which, I suppose, is a tribute to how good Hammer was). I noted -- and the others agreed -- that this was more of a live action Scooby Doo than horror film. Still and all, Cushing and Lee were good enough that we generally gave this film high grades.


The shameful admission for me is that this is -- I think -- the first time I've seen a Sherlock Holmes film. And I've never read a Sherlock Holmes book. I have seen all those annoying episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Data recreates Holmes in the holodeck. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

the long island motor parkway: exploring a new discovery

The Long Island Motor Parkway will always be in my mind as a part of my childhood. That's because

The end of the bike trail, at Union Turnpike and Winchester Boulevard

a part of it formed a bicycle path from Cunningham Park (near my home) to Alley Pond Park (a few miles away). That section formed a bicycle path, running through suburban Queens, which my sister, my father and I rode quite often. Together and apart. We called that section "The Bike Path." Short and sweet.

The bike path, or at least the paved part of it that we used, began just East of the Clearview Expressway and North of Union Turnpike. It ran Eastward, through the trees between rows of backyards. There were a few access points -- one at Bell Blvd, and one at Springfield Blvd. It crossed those North-South Boulevards via bridges. It entered Alley Pond Park a few blocks East of Springfield Blvd, and then swept downward. There was a gentle curve to the right, then down under the Grand Central Parkway. It continued downhill, sweeping back to the left. Then, further down, you could see Union Turnpike to your right and the fields of Alley Pond Park to your left. Finally, it starts climbing, and you reach a dead end atop an embankment. Facing Winchester Blvd, you've reached the end. The embankment is there because the LIMP used to continue on to the East, crossing Winchester Blvd. via bridge, and going through what is now Creedmor Psychiatric Center.

I haven't been on that path in years, but it remains a part of my childhood memories.

I was unaware that there is a historical society dedicated to researching the LIMP, and preserving its history. I guess it stands to reason, but the thought had never crossed my mind. At any rate, this past Saturday I found myself on Creedmor's grounds because of an advertised event -- a walk to explore the first new discovery about the LIMP in years. So Asher and I went to see what the hoohah was all about.

Asher at the tunnel entrance

The discovery was an underground walkway, crossing under Union Turnpike. We gathered at the North entrance, a nondescript weathered staircase on the hospital grounds. We could walk down the stairs, but the actual walkway was closed off by a locked door. We could peer through the door and see a long damp corridor with a hint of light at the other end. Howard Kroplick, a historian with the Long Island Motor Parkway preservation Society was talking about the LIMP and the underground walkway. He explained that the other end, located south of Union Turnpike was grated up. But the staff at Creedmor goes through the tunnel periodically to make sure all is OK.

This kind of puzzled me. The tunnel was a new discovery? How did that make sense? The entrance was maybe ten yards from the parking lot. The entrance to the tunnel was walled up with a locked door. The other end was grated shut. And Creedmor's staff goes through it periodically to check that it's sound. That didn't jibe.

Kroplick (or someone else -- I forget) explained that the staff at Creedmor knew of the tunnel since forever. But they didn't know that it had anything to do with the LIMP, and the Preservation Society was unaware of its existence.

There were blueprints out, and we could walk down to take a peak at the tunnel entrance. Kroplick told us stories of his time chasing LIMP-related history. My favorite story involved the building of a new bicycle path at Bethpage State Park. Workers found parkway under the surface of the ground, and realized there had been a road there. The Preservation Society was called in to investigate before construction of the bike path continued. I enjoyed the irony of Kroplick complaining that they had paved over the road.

All was going well. Asher and I were having a good time. Then the police arrived.

cinema history class: a reel of trailers

For the most part, in Keith's home-taught cinema-history class we screen one movie each week. There have been two exceptions -- during the role-reversal weeks Joe made presentations that involved TV episodes.


Well, last Thursday became another exception. An hour and a half of movie trailers. I can't even begin to try to list the films whose trailers were included. Except for The Virgin Witch. That one I remember.


Watching a long program of trailers is definitely a different experience than watching one movie. In many ways it was enjoyable. Instead of one story we got a few dozen. And many of these trailers were likely better than the movies themselves. It was actually a lot of fun, acting as the crew in a MST3K episode, tossing out barbs and heckling the screen. And it also served to provide ideas for what we'd like to see. "Hey, Keith, add this one to the list" was a constant refrain. And it's definitely useful to get a sense of the sensibilities that were at play in the film industry.


Joe suggested making this an annual tradition, and I think that's going to happen, which will make this the class' third tradition. The other traditions being our month of spaghetti westerns and our role-reversal month (which I have generally referred to as bring your own month).

more stoopid stats: world series drought edition

Table 1: The 30 longest droughts

I was thinking about the Cubs' victory in the World Series, and how it brings to a close the longest championship drought in Major League Baseball history. And what I was thinking the most is that this is an area ripe for the StoopidStats treatment.

First of all, I should note that I take issue with the fact that people are saying that the cubs ended a 108-year drought. They last won the World Series in 1908. By that logic, when a team wins the WS for the second time in a row, they are ending a one-year drought. That being the case, I think it's more appropriate to say that the Cubs ended a 107-year drought. But who am I to fight the world? Since I can't find the world, I am accepting that a drought's length is X-Y where X and Y are years that the team in question won the World Series, and they didn't win in any intervening year. Where X is the team's first win, I take Y to be 1902 (the last year before the inception of the modern World Series. Where Y is the team's most recent win, I take X to be 2016 (the current year). Although baseball's championship was called the World Series during some years in the 1800's, I am only considering the modern World Series, which began in 1903.

Now that the Cubs' drought is over, the longest active drought belongs to the Indians who are stuck in a 68-year jag. There have been a total of 141 droughts, which is equal to F+P-1 where F is the number of franchises (30) and P is the number of World Series played (111). That includes 23 one-year droughts which, per above, represent a team winning the series a second, third, fourth or fifth time in a row. Table 1 shows the 30 longest droughts, and table 2 shows each franchise's longest drought. A note about the second table -- there are 31 entries because the Cardinals have had two 24-year droughts, which are tied for the franchise's longest.




Table 2: Each franchise's longest drought

Droughts these days are necessarily longer than droughts from years past, simply because there are more franchises. With 30 teams, each one wins, on average, once every 30 years. When there were only 16 teams, each one won, on average, once every 16 years. I should put something together that normalizes adjusts drought length for the number of teams. The task is made more difficult by the fact that many of these droughts span years that included expansions. So it's not as if I can multiply each drought's length by a simple factor. More troubling is how to handle the two years (1904 and 1994) that didn't have a World Series. I am open to suggestions.

baseball stoopid stats (2016 edition) #4: wins, losses and games over 500 (by state)

I presented a chart of all major league baseball franchises and their cumulative games above .500 (along with a table of active franchises ranked by wins) here.

Then I combined the franchises based on the geographic location indicated in their names. That chart and table are here.

For my third trick, I combine the teams based on their home state. Note that for these purposes I treat the District of Columbia, Quebec and Ontario as if they are states. To date, 28 states have had major league franchises. Of those, 19 had at least one franchise in 2016. The winningest, New York, has had 27,614 wins and stands 3,279 wins over .500 -- thanks largely to the Yankees and their significantly winning record. In 28th is Iowa, whose only major league team, the Keokuk Westerns, went 1-12 in 1875.

While New York and Pennsylvania are ahead in wins, it's only a matter of time before California, with five franchises, passes them. Barring changes in the the number and/or locations of teams, that is. New York and Pennsylvania are ahead simply because they each had three teams for the majority of the 20th century, and two teams for most or all of the rest. California didn't hava franchise until 1958 when the Dodgers and Giants moved there. It expanded to three with the inception of the Angels in 1961, then to four when the A's moved to Oakland in 1968 and five when the Padres were introduced in 1969.

By the way, in 2016 Florida (with two teams) passed Washington (one team) to move into 15th place.

baseball stoopid stats (2016 edition) #3: wins, losses and games over 500 (by location)

In my last post, I presented my graph of the cumulative games above 500 stat for every major league baseball franchise. That post was here.


One thing that I didn't mention is that I also track wins, losses and games over .500 by location. That is, grouping franchises by the location indicated ion their names. the "New York Yankees" are part of New York. The "Texas Rangers" are part of Texas. Note that, in this scheme, some franchises have different parts of their records attributed to different locations. For example, the Dodgers' record through 1957 is part of Brooklyn. Their record since 1958 is part of Los Angeles. There have been 54 different locations represented in the major leagues, and the graph is as follows:

The locations, listed in order of wins (most to least) is at right. Among locations that no longer have a franchise, the one with the most wins is Brooklyn.