Dave's List

I fought the March 4 Lefthand Canyon fire . I happened to take a plane ride over top and some pictures from the ground in the same day.

Improv Everywhere strikes again.  This is the same group I wrote about here .

OK, I got to watching the HBO mini-series Epitafios (awesome show, IMHO), where one of the main characters is in the habit of playing Russian Roulette. My instinct was to agree with the odds initially posted on the wikipedia article here and discussed here , that with no respin, the odds go up on each subsequent trigger pull: 1/6, 1/5, 1/4…. etc. to 1/1 on the sixth. I realized that this was a misreprentation of the statistics, because only one "selection" was made at the beginning of the game (the spin). So I wrote a program to simulate the game, and to my pleasant surprise, I was right, each pull is 1/6 up until the sixth pull which is 1/1.

Long story short, Russian Roulette doesn’t become successively more dangerous as you play. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never play, but this was kind of interesting to me to do the math (and a interesting example of how the self-correcting nature of Wikipedia is accessible to everybody.)

Lucky, lucky, lucky.