What all this Leno/Conan/Late Night Gubbins is about: a primer for friends in the UK
http://littleredboat.co.uk/?p=3132
You may recently have seen people complaining about... some row that went on between Jay, um, Leno and Conan O'Brian on some kind of late-night talk show aired in America. For that matter, you might have seen references to said late night talk shows in general, and be in the situation for which we need a word of "OK, so it's a late night talk show. What's it good at? What's it famous for?"
The linked post does a lovely job of explaining why the row was very, very entertaining, even if you don't normally want to read about dick-waving contests between people you've barely heard of.
"And so began a monumental game of chicken. Conan went onto his show every night subsequently, and did monologues that consisted entirely of calling his network useless, unpopular, incapable of running itself - of calling its executives liars and thieves, and calling Leno all manner of other things"
"it has been, for a brief time, a remarkable insight on the workings of it all - and the true bitterness, fear and anger present in all parts of the industry (of most similar industries) right now."
People with Exactly Two Children and At Least One Daughter, what's the gender make-up of your kids
There's a well-known paradox[1] in statistics, which goes that "suppose you know Mrs Smith has two children, and you see something that suggests that (at least) one of them is a girl. What are the chances that the other one is a boy?"
People instinctively say "50/50"[2]. But in fact, it's 2/3.
This is because there 50% of families have mixed children, 25% two girls, and 25% two boys, so there are twice as many boy/girl families as girl/girl families. You can see this easily if you agree the first child was 50/50 boy/girl, and so boy followed by girl and boy followed by boy are both 25%, as are the other two possibilities.
What's funny is that here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=548550 someone acknowledged that this may not be intuitive to everyone, so made a poll which actually asked people to respond if they had two children, at least one a girl, and say which make-up their family had. It's so much more convincing to see the poll made of actual people, actually showing a 2:1 ratio[3].
( Read more... )
http://littleredboat.co.uk/?p=3132
You may recently have seen people complaining about... some row that went on between Jay, um, Leno and Conan O'Brian on some kind of late-night talk show aired in America. For that matter, you might have seen references to said late night talk shows in general, and be in the situation for which we need a word of "OK, so it's a late night talk show. What's it good at? What's it famous for?"
The linked post does a lovely job of explaining why the row was very, very entertaining, even if you don't normally want to read about dick-waving contests between people you've barely heard of.
"And so began a monumental game of chicken. Conan went onto his show every night subsequently, and did monologues that consisted entirely of calling his network useless, unpopular, incapable of running itself - of calling its executives liars and thieves, and calling Leno all manner of other things"
"it has been, for a brief time, a remarkable insight on the workings of it all - and the true bitterness, fear and anger present in all parts of the industry (of most similar industries) right now."
People with Exactly Two Children and At Least One Daughter, what's the gender make-up of your kids
There's a well-known paradox[1] in statistics, which goes that "suppose you know Mrs Smith has two children, and you see something that suggests that (at least) one of them is a girl. What are the chances that the other one is a boy?"
People instinctively say "50/50"[2]. But in fact, it's 2/3.
This is because there 50% of families have mixed children, 25% two girls, and 25% two boys, so there are twice as many boy/girl families as girl/girl families. You can see this easily if you agree the first child was 50/50 boy/girl, and so boy followed by girl and boy followed by boy are both 25%, as are the other two possibilities.
What's funny is that here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=548550 someone acknowledged that this may not be intuitive to everyone, so made a poll which actually asked people to respond if they had two children, at least one a girl, and say which make-up their family had. It's so much more convincing to see the poll made of actual people, actually showing a 2:1 ratio[3].
( Read more... )