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.