Monday, February 07, 2005

Just Another MADnic Monday

Reading Tim Bray's blog this morning and replying to Paul Downey about a MotorHead video, I found I had to review the definition of a stochastic process.

Maybe it's just me, but the fact that probability space for a stochastic process is labeled by a giant W is the universe laughing about the last election or at the electorate with SUVs sporting the bumper stickers of President Bush.

"Roll The Dice, Martha! Shorly he l'arned sumpin' in the last f'ar y'ars."

... but chance has no memory and neither does George W. We could try the Democrats again, but they keep coming up with really complicated plans and as any chaos theorist or stage magician can tell you, the longer the spell, the less likely the outcome is to be what you predict.

This is the best. It comes from a lecture by Doyle Farmer:

"Creating reality
Guys like you are ‘in what we called the reality-based community’, defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.’
A senior advisor to G.W. Bush, to Ron Susskind"

As Tim Bray says, ya just can't make these things up. It's just another Alfred E. Neumann kind of day. "What, Me Worry?"

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