• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Knowing that the ball was gold gives you Bayesian knowledge about the boxes behind the door, since the prior probability of the host pulling a gold ball from a 6-gold door is different than from the 3/3 door. So you have to multiply Monty Hall probabilities and Bayesian probabilities together.

    That assumes the host pulled a ball at random, of course, and not a deliberately gold ball.



  • it’s not clear that he’s following Monty Hall rules

    Whenever I see a badly-specified Monty Hall Problem, I always imagine the host saying something like “Oh, you want to pick door number 1? Well, guess what - the car was behind door number 3 all along! You get nothing but a goat!” And only when you initially pick a door with the car does the host ask “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather switch to door number 2? Look, there is even a goat behind door number 3!” Switching doors 100% gurantees you get a goat… or 50% silver balls in this case.



  • can I just slot stuff like program settings back

    There isn’t really much software that is A) cross-platform, B) popular enough on Windows that you would have been using it, and C) the best choice for the task on Linux. Maybe Firefox the only one? Firefox profiles actually can be copied over without change, I believe. A torrent client - you’d probably want a new one and configure the destination directory, re-import the torrent files, and re-verify local files. Photoshop would get replaced with Gimp. For software that runs under wine, you can and should copy over stuff like game profiles and savegames - wine creates a “fake” drive_c directory so they’ll go into there. You just need to track each of them down in your Windows %APPDATA% directory or wherever it is Windows hides them in before you erase the drive.

    Will the external drive need to be formatted in a specific way first?

    No. It’s easier to let Windows format the backup drive how it wants (NTFS) and let Linux read it later than to teach Windows how to read/write Linux preferred filesystem format. Most Linux distros already come with ntfs driver pre-installed, or it is a single install command away.


  • Tumbling dice are governed by the laws of physics, which are deterministic. The outcome is predetermined by the motion of the atoms within the dice and the air, and whether you win or lose cannot be altered, before the dice even hit the table.

    When you blow on the dice, the breath comes of your own will, from the action of your mind and soul, which physics cannot explain and is non-deterministic. By blowing, you are introducing true randomness into the motion of the atoms (not the fake pseudo-randomness of stochastic mechanics!). This is the only time that luck can come into play. If your soul has strong aura, then you can use your breath to imbibe the dice with good luck and win for sure.





  • Both this paper and the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment paper (arXiv:quant-ph/9903047) only show a single blob, not the double stripe. If anyone has a paper that clearly shows a photo with the double stripes the way it’s shown in the classic monkey meme, I’d like to add it to my collection!

    Obviously if the slits are big and wide enough apart you will just get two spotlights, so that doesn’t count. It wouldn’t even demonstrate wave physics, let alone quantum. It has to be a paper where there is some switch you turn on or some filter you slide in place or whatever that makes the image on the physical screen toggle between two stripes and multiple.

    If we cover one slit, it will look like figure 3, shifted to the side and at half intensity.