Uncooperative Crickets

I bought a subscription to The Daily Show from iTunes. It seems like a good idea - I pay $10, and I get a month's worth of Daily Shows (16 episodes) downloaded to my computer. It's cheaper than cable. Actually, I just did the same thing for The Colbert Report. Twenty dollars is still cheaper than cable.

I finished reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs for the nth time. It was good, but I noticed two errors this time. When refering to Super Bowl XXXVI, Klosterman mistakening writes about "Ricky Proel" (it should be "Proehl").

The second error is something that I probably should have noticed right away, except that I am not much of a gambler. Klosterman has a short essay saying that everything is life is 50-50: "What are the chances that your sister will die from ovarian cancer next summer? 50-50 (either she'll die from ovarian cancer or she won't). What are the chances that your sister will become America's most respected underwater welding specialist? 50-50. It will happen, or it won't. There are two possibilities, and both are plausible and unknown."

Now, clearly I understood that this is not a mathematically sound argument. "Percent" comes from "per cent," or "out of one hundred." This implies repetition, which Klosterman is ignoring. A slightly more sophisticated argument would be that everything in life has either a 100% chance of happening or a 0% chance of happening. This also ignores the meaning of percent, but you could at least convince the people who don't agree with the premise of Sliding Doors that an event was bound to occur under the same circumstances. Or maybe that's what Sliding Doors was all about; I'm not really sure.

No, I am not arguing with that on purpose. I had to write a paragraph on that because my brain has turned to mush over the last six years. Instead, I am intending to write about the sentence that directly follows the quote about the underwater welding above: "There are two possibilites, and both are plausible and unknown. The odds are 2:1."

I never caught that before - probably because I am not a good gambler - but 2:1 odds means that you have a 67% (approximately) chance of winning. You would have two chances of winning for every chance of losing. Klosterman should have said that the odds are 1:1.

I feel like a big man now.

"You must overtly love whatever music seems the most detached from your own personal experience."

posted by Dirk Awesome @ 10:36 PM