Musings about life on two wheels
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The Drunkards Walk: Probability hierarchy & Monty Hall
Tl;Dr: understanding probability is hard when using vague terms. Here, have a picture Here’s my understanding now Imagine you want to understand the probability of something happening, assuming there are a finite number of equally probable results. For example: what are the chances of 2 dice summing to ’10’ in one throw. The Trial is…
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Fighting handlebar vibration
Tl;Dr: Foam in handlebars is unlikely to help I’ve been riding Jim’s Brompton. It goes fast, but the bars vibrate on gravel. Adding foam to handlebars was an idea from motorcycling. Apparently – irrelevant to cycling: https://www.reddit.com/r/gravelcycling/s/PvsXIk7Gxr
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How to Pack your Brompton
Tl;Dr: Use a Ikea Dimpla bag This summer I’m going to France on a bike tour. We are taking our own bikes, or in my case borrowing a friends. Getting a bike on an airplane isn’t a huge issue – packing it in a cardboard box is pretty straight forward. Getting it on a TGV…
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The Drunkards walk: Chapter 2
Tl;DR I love how much this book refers back to Thinking Fast and Slow. One of the first examples of how complicated it is for people to think about probability is the somewhat famous Linda problem aka the Conjunction Fallacy. Essentially: If you give a person two options, one of which has additional detail, more…
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Laws of Probability
Nothing new here, I’m just writing these down to remember them in the future I learned these from The Drunkards Walk, but they are also discussed here https://jonathanbecher.com/2017/06/25/the-3-laws-of-probability-everyone-should-know/
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Dawn of Everything: Chapter 5
Chapter 5 of Dawn of Everything is maybe my favorite. Like all of them, it seems to start off with a simple premise, and goes all over the map before winding up: Coastal Native American cultures defined themselves in opposition to each other in ways that are surprisingly sophisticated. I mean – that’s probably not…
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Walla Walla with Merry Bikers
Just spent 3 days in the lovely spring of Walla Walla riding bikes with the Merry Bikers. So much fun to be out rolling around. Walla walla was verdant – dogwoods and everything in urgent bloom. The wheat fields were overflowing waves of green. The river ran through it. And everybody seemed very nice, polite…
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Richard Feynmen on bikes
So fascinating:
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The Drunkards Walk – Book Review pt 1
I’ve been reading The Drunkards Walk – How Randomness Rules our lives. Really interesting! The main points being: Some examples: ‘ Hot hand’ or streaks in sports (and movie producing, and corporate earnings, and investment returns) are accounted for by random chance, _even though they seem like they aren’t_. Firing the coach or CEO for…
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What is Intelligence: Lynn Margulis
Still haven’t finished chapter 1, but I’ve been really interested to learn about Lynn Margulis. She’s the reason Blaise talks about Symbiosis (and also is perhaps the reason the book is called ‘What is Intelligence’ (she wrote ‘What is Life‘). To recap: in the book ‘What is Intelligence’ Blaise Agüera y Arcas writes about the…
Got any book recommendations?