A nice cool day today, so I attacked the old garden shed with a mixture of saw, crowbar and sledgehammer. Yes, the longer I spent the bigger the tool. I now have a floor and half of a wall left, ready for converting into a raised deck. I also have a lot of wood that I removed. Now I need to find something to use the old wood for now. Half rotted, poor quality wood. Any ideas?
I see there are lots of adverts for lotteries of various kinds going out at the moment. I remember a really interesting television programme looking at why people played the lottery and investigating the relationship to their ability to judge probability. It appears that a lot of people have very poor perception of probability.
There is the interesting story about the board of a large company whizzing through million pound decisions quickly, but spending ages discussing the price of a shed for storage. All to do with being able to relate to some numbers and not others.
I love going to casinos in Las Vegas, but I never see it as gambling. I always treat it as paying for an evening of fun. I go out with the amount of money I am prepared to spend on a nights entertainment and count it as a win if I return home with some of it.
Tonight we were discussing the allocation of people to breakout rooms in Zoom and what are the chances of finding the same person time after time. Probabilities can be hard to judge. If there are 30 people in a room then there is a more than 50% chance that two will share the same birthday. If there are 40 people in the room then the chance goes up to 90%.
There has been a lot of complaints about not knowing whether we can meet one or two people under the rules. In this region the app currently says there are 1 in 10 households with COVID-19 (accuracy is not great). In places like Swansea it is as high as 1 in 5. With numbers like that the question should not be can I meet one or two people, but really should be whether it is really that essential for you to meet anybody. The probabilities are really pretty high and the potential consequences high.
We complain about people having parties during lockdown. But most of us stretch the rules a little bit – a lot of us have that feeling of being able to live forever. What is in our brains can often be disconnected from reality – just look at the conspiracy theories people believe.
How do we find a way to connect to reality? What is reality? I have said a few times we live in a post-factual age. Science is questioned, fact-feelings are shouted loud on social media. For some reason people have moved to this new framework for thinking, and it is an interesting concept to talk about. That is until somebody is pointing a COVID firing Magnum at us and asking if we feel lucky. Then it becomes important to know the fact – did Harry fire 5 or 6 shots?