On September 9, 1990 the following letter was published in the “Ask Marilyn” column of an American magazine called Parade:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: ‘Do you want to pick door #2?’ Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?  —Craig F. Whitaker, Maryland

If you’re like me, you couldn’t read this question without pausing and pondering the answer on your own. The situation sounds familiar – I have a vague memory of watching a similar conundrum on Australian TV in the ’80s. Three doors, a prize, and a gloating authority figure offering ambiguous encouragement. The dramatic climax of a show where beaming Guy Smiley host transforms into dark manipulator, toying with the contestant’s dreams in the name of entertainment.

If they’re your dreams you must know the game is rigged, that the host is out to get you. A matador to your bullish goal, twirling and goading on his abstract perch of perfect information. But what if it wasn’t up to him? What if, no matter which door you picked first, he must show you a goat behind another door, then offer to let you switch?

As it happens, this was a question that Marilyn vos Savant was able to answer, in a reply that sparked thousands of angry letters from readers of all stripes. Discarding the host’s motivations by forcing him to offer the switch allows us to boil the question down to one of simple (though counter-intuitive) probability. In this form it is commonly known as the Monty Hall problem, named after the host of a long-running game show called Let’s Make a Deal.

The answer? You switch!

Although it seems at first that switching might give you even odds at best, the truth is that it would always give you a 2/3 chance of taking the prize. If you don’t switch you’ll be stuck with a 1/3 chance, which is exactly the same as you had before any doors were opened. To illustrate, let’s say there are three doors – A (with fabulous prize), B (with goat), and C (with goat). If you can trust me here, and always agree to switch, then this can play out in three ways…

1. You pick door A (prize). Monty opens door B or C to show a goat. You switch to the other door, which is also a goat. FAIL.
2. You pick door B (goat). Monty opens door C to show a goat. You switch to door A, which holds the prize. WIN!
3. You pick door C (goat). Monty opens door B to show a goat. You switch to door A, which holds the prize. WIN!

See if you play it like this, then the only way you can lose is if you pick the prize door to begin with. So would you have stayed? Don’t worry, we’re not alone. Many of the letters Parade received on the topic were apparently from professional mathematicians and scientists. Some of these challenged her assumption on the ‘always offer‘ behaviour of the host, but many others simply chastised her for faulty probability. Here’s an example from a Virginian professor of mathematics:

You blew it! (…) Let me explain: If one door is shown to be a loser, that information changes the probability of either remaining choice – neither of which has any reason to be more likely – to 1/2. As a professional mathematician, I’m very concerned with the general public’s lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error and, in the future, being more careful.

To his credit, this gentleman wrote back later to apologize and retract his complaint, citing “intense professional embarrassment”. An earlier version of this problem had been analyzed in 1959 by Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner, who concluded that ”in no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory.”

win fail, goat, mathematics, win

While ambling in the city recently I was struck with a sudden craving for Delicious Cake. This isn’t a feeling that hits me often – more frequently my sweet tooth will ache for a muffin, a donut, or a custard tart. But I digress. On this day it wanted some cake and, well, who am I to argue?

The confection in question.

In a shopfront on George Street I spotted this little number covered in cocoa, with crusty sides and chocolate frills. So I read the sign, and was paralyzed by an unforeseen internal monologue…

• Slice: $3.60
• 8 Inches: $36.00
• Full Month: $20.00
  

Now slices I understand. A fraction of the cake, made by cutting in in half, then those halves in half, then those quarters in half, and so on. Slices are produced in powers of two. Easy!

So, inches, huh? Okay. Not metric, but we can work with that. Eight inches must be the diameter of the cake. Yeah that makes sense. So the whole cake is the price of…ten slices? Okay, that’s a nice round figure but it’s not a power of two. How do they cut the cake into ten slices? A cake-cutting robot? No, that’s not really very clever Andy, make sure that doesn’t end up in the blog post.

Full Month. What? They’re introducing a factor of time now? Hang on. Maybe a full month means a full cake. It’s baker’s jargon! Let’s see, 8 times about 3 makes about 20 dollars. No. Yes! No. Then what’s 8 Inches?

And so I stood there at the window, frozen in place by this puzzle of pastry. Until I remembered the fact that I don’t actually like Tiramisu. Now don’t get me wrong here – coffee is great! Cake is great! Mixing them is great! But pre-mixing them just doesn’t work for me. Now flustered, I had lost my appetite…

Epilogue. This enigmatic encounter haunted me long enough to research the facts, like a legitimate writer might have pretended to do in days of yore.  So gentle readers, let the record show that Tiramisu is actually a recent invention of dubious origin, and furthermore I have it on good authority that this particular specimen is Not Delicious.

Full Month seems to have referred to a Chinese custom. Apparently, when a baby is born it is traditional for friends and relatives to give the parents a small gift of money. When that baby turns one month old its parents then return the favour with a small box of cake.

8 Inches? Still no idea. It’s a mystery I can live with for now…

UPDATE: Mystery solved! See comment from Sara.

culture, fail, oddball ravings cake, fail, monologue

Facebook (top) vs. Xiaonei (bottom).

This month marks the third anniversary of social network Xiaonei, which is often called the Facebook of China. Until recently I wasn’t aware of how closely this label really comes to the truth.

You see, the Chinese government generally takes a very hands-off approach to the enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights,  particularly those of foreign interests. Their regulators feel that a laissez-faire approach is justified so long as China is behind the economic curve. Ignoring the the pesky details of IP ownership has its advantages, and allows many Chinese businesses to thrive as they service insatiable demand for brand-name merchandise at bargain prices. At least 15 to 20 percent of goods made in the country last year were counterfeit, stimulating exports and allowing Chinese consumers to experience many of the perceived benefits of living in a wealthier country.

One downside to this strategy is that it can sometimes make foreign companies (especially the innovators) reluctant to invest in China, given the impunity with which their efforts might be duplicated. What’s interesting about Xiaonei (roughly, “On Campus“) is that it’s a copycat that has received massive investment from the United States.

More accurately, Xiaonei was bought out in 2006 by a company called Oak Pacific, which is in turn backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists DCM, and investment firm General Atlantic. As of April 2008 it had reportedly raised US$430 million, which actually makes it better funded than Facebook!

After going through the sign-up process, I’ve found a great many similarities between the two services, with plenty of layouts and artwork lifted almost directly. This strikes me as lazy, given Xiaonei’s immense budget. While I can understand the strategy of following a market leader and appreciate that functionality is hard to monopolize through IP law, it’s difficult to justify the actual theft of icon art from a competing service. In most instances these icons were reproduced with trivial variations, but I found at least two icons (“No Mail”, and “Edit Information”) that appear to be pixel-perfect copies.

With more than 30 million registered users (a third of them active), Xiaonei is a staggering success given that internet penetration in China just passed 15% this year. After much ado Facebook finally launched a simplified-Chinese version of their service in June this year, but its users have had to deal with access problems and nobody can say yet if it will really take off. The network effect would imply that right now it’s better to be a Xiaonei user in China than a Facebook user, but it’s hard to maintain a lead while following the footprints of a competing service. Perhaps what Xiaonei is really after is to be acquired by Facebook. If this were to happen it could be a win for everybody.

I would think that connecting China socially to the rest of the world benefits all involved (especially users), as it seems like a lot of money and valuable skills are being wasted on keeping Chinese users in a separate but virtually identical network. If Xiaonei does in fact have revolutionary ideas and technology then great, let them sell it to Facebook who can spread it to the rest of the world. If it turns out they do not, that the Xiaonei service is in fact a replica, then its users may barely notice the transition.

copyright, social media china, copyright, social media, venture capital

Logging, anyone?

I just got back from Borders in Pitt St, Sydney where I tried to use this coupon to get 35% off a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers. Before I left work for some late-night shopping I’d considered printing the coupon as supposedly required, but then thought no - I would make a statement.

Rocking up to the counter I handed over the book along with my greasy iPhone displaying a zoomed-in view of the coupon’s barcode. With a wink and a winning smile I was saving paper and leading society into its wireless future!

The tired woman at the counter wasn’t nearly as impressed as I was. She blinked, then explained in a well-rehearsed monotone that, ”as stipulated on the coupon we can only accept printed versions”. For this I was ready with a rehearsed response of my own. “So what’s the difference?” I inquired as casually as I could, confident in the power of my enlightened eco-rhetoric to blow her mind wide open.

“We need it on the paper because we count them by hand.”

Yep. Apparently they scan the barcodes onto their computers, but for some reason don’t record a count of how many times they’ve done that. Long story short, I left speechless and bookless. I did not have a canned response for this, nor could I express a sufficient amount of outrage at the time. Luckily, Al Gore invented the internet for this very purpose.

fail, oddball ravings book, coupon, environment, iphone, retail

My friend Suzie (musician and mad scientist) recently alerted me to the fact that our stomachs have BRAINS!

Apparently embedded in the lining of our guts is a network of up to a billion neurons (1% of the number in our head-brains) that is capable of autonomous action. It controls our digestive muscles and the secretion of enzymes, which it varies according to the bulk and nutrient composition of our food. It learns, it remembers, in a sense it can be said to understand digestion. Spooky, but its function doesn’t end there (and neither will my wild over-simplifications).

This enteric nervous system (ENS) can also release neurotransmitter goodies to reward your head-brain for providing it with food. That’s right, this thing in your belly controls you like a puppet on a string.

But you know where I’m really going here? The horrifying, primordial gravity of the situation?

Since the ability to metabolize nutrients for energy was a pre-requisite for the evolution of higher functions like locomotion, our central nervous system (head-brain et al.) developed after our enteric nervous system. This means the “second” brain in your belly was really here first.

If you turn this situation on its side and squint, you can see that our heads, our minds, our opposable thumbs…all exist in the service of our stomachs! Essentially, your entire body is one big prehensile appendage of your digestive system.

oddball ravings brain, free will, gut, spooky

I’m reading an excellent 1997 book called Interview - a compilation of interviews by New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus. The very first one jumped out at me, a poignant conversation with the Dalai Lama of Tibet published in November ’93. Dreifus asks him what he does to relax, and he mentions gardening and reading. It’s a pretty ‘soft’ question, but his answer becomes candid as he elabourates:

I am a man of peace, but I am fond of looking at picture books of the Second World War. I own some, which I believe are produced by Time-Life. I’ve just ordered a new set. Thirty books.

Really? Why does the Reincarnation of Compassion have such a fascination with one of the most terrible events in human history?

Perhaps because the stories are so negative and gruesome, they strengthen my belief in nonviolence. [Smiles.] However, I find many of the machines of violence very attractive. Tanks, airplanes, warships, especially aircraft carriers. And German U-boats, submarines….

I think this was a very human answer. There is something compelling to many people – myself included, about the weapons and trappings of war. Perhaps it’s cultural indoctrination, that violent escapism is fostered to some extent when we are young. Or it might be something innate, that humans instinctively know violence as a means of empowerment. Whatever the reason I was surprised that this holy man of peace, a Buddhist Reincarnation of Compassion would also profess his attraction to the fetishization of war. And I read on:

I once read that as a little boy in Lhasa, you liked war toys.

Yes, very much. I also had an air rifle in Lhasa. And I have one in India. I often feed small birds, but when they come together, hawks spot them and catch them – a very bad thing. So in order to protect these small birds, I keep a rifle.

So it is a Buddhist rifle?

[Laughs.] A compassionate rifle!

Again it’s a human answer, but on this point I differed with His Holiness. I can understand the desire to prevent defenseless suffering, but saw in those decades of hawk-shooting just vain interruptions of the natural order. He might be preventing immediate suffering (assuming the hawk dies quickly), but what of the offspring that hawk might be feeding? Is the life of a predator worth less than the life of its prey? Surely the hawk’s role is to eat smaller birds, just as those birds might eat insects.

Finally, here was proof of what I had always suspected. I was morally superior to the Dalai Lama!

Then I did some digging online, and it all went sour. I had mistakenly equated the use of the rifle with the murdering of innocent hawks. Instead he clarifies in an interview elsewhere that he uses it to scare the hawks, not kill them. I would have thought there were more efficient ways to do this – devices that were louder and less dangerous than an air rifle, but I’m grasping at straws.

fail, interview, religion bird, dalai lama, fail, gun, interview