Fun with numbers & patterns

How did the statistician die on his camping trip? He tried fording a river that was three feet deep on average.

I suspect most of us know that statistics can be misleading, but they're still one of the most important tools we have for understanding the world around us. Just ask any baseball fan. Or meteorologist. Or political analyst. (Actually, maybe not political analysts. Best to just slowly back away and not make eye contact with them.)

One of the biggest problems with statistical data actually comes from one of our greatest strengths: our pattern recognition ability. No computer in the world comes close to our ability to spot patterns, but sometimes that very ability backfires on us.

We often start looking for patterns in the data that aren't actually there. An absurd example is the correlation between pirates and global warming—as the number of pirates goes down, global temperatures go up. Sports superstitions are another good example: my favorite team won when I wore my lucky hat, so they'll lose if I don't wear it while they're playing.

Even if you entirely avoid the false pattern recognition pitfall, you still have a lot to consider.

McCoy: Searching for Patterns

Humans also tend to remember the negative more often than not: when the weatherman's wrong, you remember that better than all the (many more) times he’s been right. Commercial weather channels often artificially inflate low chances of rain—say, from 5-10% up to 20%—so that if it doesn't rain it seems like a nice bonus. And if it does rain, well, 20% isn't nearly as low risk as 5%. We like it when errors fall in our favor.

So you're keeping your eyes open for suspect statistics. Great. Now you just have to keep on the lookout for the possibility that the people presenting the statistics are deliberately misleading you. Assuming they haven't just made up the data entirely (less common than you'd expect, since it's so easy to mislead with real data), you've still got to worry about them changing the scale of one of the axes of a graph, switching the axis themselves, or using one of a thousand different tricks within the math behind the data.

A quick example of another trick people can play with data: I recently saw a chart that was supposed to show Victorian England as a safer place to live than the modern day by comparing crimes per capita.

The problem with that? Society's definition of a crime. Crimes that we legislate against and prosecute tend to change over time. We currently have more laws today than at any other point in our history, so it's not surprising that we have more criminal charges per capita. In my example, what historians and criminologists actually use for comparison is murders per capita, because that's always a crime. By that metric, we're a lot safer than Victorian England. (Among other things, muggers today are less fond of garroting their victims.)

It's easy to play tricks like this—using categories of data that seem comparable but really aren't.

How can you look out for statistical shenanigans, if they're so easy to pull off? First, and easiest, try to stick with reliable, well known publications with solid reputations. (Of course, if you're far to one side or the other on the political spectrum, you're probably convinced they're a tool of the other side.)

Second, and much more difficult: Educate yourself. Learn to read data in a discerning matter and familiarize yourself with the subject matter. A good book to start with is Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise.

Of course, you could just look for data and news sources that agree with what you already think. Confirmation bias is fun!

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I kid a lot with my pal Jeff at The Yard Ramp Guy. And now, also this: I'm seriously proud of my friends and colleagues at that fine company on their receiving the Blue Star award from Bluff Manufacturing, which has recognized them as a Gold Dealer of Excellence. Absolutely fitting, and absolutely right.

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Quotable

Okay, enough mush. Dear Yard Ramp Guy, statistically I stay quotable each week more than you (but who’s counting?).

“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."

— Mark Twain

Some science results in vital, society-altering work. Think about our creating vaccines, researching earthquakes, and discovering new construction materials.

Other science makes valuable contributions to our understanding of the universe around us—theoretical physics or marine biology, for example—and these very often produce society-altering work.

Then, of course, there is the science that doesn't quite have the same sort of impact, like magnetically levitating a frog or creating a chemical recipe to partially unboil an egg.

The Ig Nobel Prize is given out each September, around the time of the real Nobel prizes. It's broadcast every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving on NPR's program “Science Friday,” which makes for a much better use of my time than hunting Black Friday deals.

The awards either criticize (awarding a prize in “science education” to the Kansas State Board of Education for their stance on teaching evolution in schools) or to gently rib scientists for absurd research (testing the “five second rule” for eating food off the ground, which they proved to be false).

A few of my favorites:Discovering that the word “huh” or an equivalent seems to exist in every language.

• Realizing that if you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, it then walks in the same way that dinosaurs were thought to have walked.
• Measuring the friction between a banana skin and a shoe, and a banana skin and the floor, when we step on the banana.
• Investigating whether cat ownership is mentally hazardous (I could have answered that).
• Testing how reindeer react to seeing humans disguised as polar bears.
• Finding that some people could run on water, if that water were in the Moon's gravity instead of Earth's.
• Discovering the biochemical process by which onions make people cry.
• Figuring out that leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller.
• Calculating the balance of physical forces inside a human ponytail
• Discovering a way to extract vanillin (the active component of vanilla) from cow dung.

All of my favorites are in the real-but-absurd science category: the awards given out to people doing homeopathy or predicting the end of the world are grin-worthy…but not all that interesting.

The absurd science category sometimes becomes relevant: Sir Andre Geim won both the Ig Nobel Prize (he was the one to levitate the small frog with magnets) and the Nobel Prize for his work on graphene.

And the Ig Nobel award-winning study showing that malaria mosquitoes are attracted to Limburger cheese has been used to create large-scale mosquito traps in strategic locations in Africa.

Mostly, though, I just find that the real science is funnier.

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Quotable

Yes, Yard Ramp Guy—I remain blog relevant. You?

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That's funny…’"

— Isaac Asimov

Do I look like I'm playing games?

When I was a little kid, I hated board games. Absolutely did not like them. Especially Monopoly.

Risk I could tolerate about once or twice a year. Chess and checkers I could tolerate. That was the extent of the games we had (so maybe my choices were too limited). On rare occasions, I'd get to try a game someone else owned, but there weren't a lot out there (so maybe I come from a place where people didn’t play board games).

Things stick with us. These days, I’m surprised every time I see someone's board game collection (so maybe everyone’s not like me).

We're in a veritable board game renaissance right now. Most estimates put the number published each year in the thousands.

Of course, a huge chunk of these games are still terrible. Many are incredibly complicated and take hours—or even days—to play. Which, I suppose, is just fine for those with that kind of free time, but most of us don't have such free time. Other games are spat out quickly…or are just mediocre rip-offs of another game.

Bored.

Still, and muffling my rant just a bit, there are probably a gaggle of good new games published every year.

I’ve picked up a few over the years that I've grown to like, mostly for my kids and grandkids. My favorite is one I bought for my grandkids: Master Labyrinth. I still drag it out whenever they come over, and I'm probably more excited to play it than they are.

While I was reading about board games, I decided to hunt down the oldest.

Senet, Backgammon and The Royal Game of Ur are more than 4,000 years old. Go is about 2,500 years old, and Parcheesi is nearly 2,000. Tafl, a Viking ancestor of chess, is some 1,600 years old.

Yes. Humans have been playing games for fun for a long, long time. For better or worse. Mostly worse, I say.

This isn't just an old man rambling on and on about board games. Because I refuse to admit to being old…until I retire.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy, still on topic with a quotation:

“I can see how he (Sandy Koufax) won twenty-five games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five.”

— Yogi Berra

Smokey the Bear causes forest fires. Well, he sort of makes them worse.

I'm only half joking here. In the early 1900s, forest fire prevention and firefighting policies specifically campaigned to suppress all fires and we got very, very good at it.

Smokey the Bear, introduced in 1944, was an effective part of the campaign. The problem with all of the fire fighting, though? Undergrowth started to build up.

As it turns out, ecosystems have actually evolved to deal with fires. For example, many trees actually require fire in order to sprout their seeds. Which means that we “need” regular forest fires in order to clear out undergrowth, so that new growth can fill in.

If that undergrowth isn't cleared out—say, due to people preventing forest fires for decades—when a fire finally does occur, it's likely to be a full crown fire, instead of a relatively harmless and beneficial ground fire. A crown fire is one that grows large enough to burn material up in the tops of trees and completely wipes out all vegetation in a region.

This can lead to massive surface erosion, wildlife die-offs, alteration of surface chemistry, and many other negative consequences. Some crown fires can grow large enough to become firestorms, which create their own wind systems.

Here's a crown fire:

For comparison, here are the aftereffects of a ground fire, in time lapse:

Since the 1960s, though, scientists have recognized and begun pushing steps to correct the problem. Controlled burns have become much more common in the decades since, and the expenses involved in running them safely are more than recouped by the lack of damages from much larger, more dangerous fires.

So, Smokey the Bear did develop from a wrong-minded way of looking at wildfire control, but he still does serve one important purpose: controlled burns need to be started by professionals. If you're camping in the woods, be careful with your fires.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy, only you can prevent bad quotations:

“The grass is always greener around the fire hydrant.”

— Jeff Rich

That's me, looking for cashews.

Anyone who's worked in shipping—or anyone who has ever opened a jar of mixed nuts—has experienced the same thing, over and over again: When you're moving a jumble of little stuff, the big items (or Brazil nuts) always end up at the top.

At first glance, it seems simple enough: the smaller stuff can just fit down into the holes between everything else. Problem solved. Except...if that were true, then the small stuff would be at the bottom but the big stuff would still be scattered all the way through.

Well, what about density? If the big items are just less dense, they'd pop right to the top, yes? Well, sometimes, though much denser large objects also tend to rise to the top. It's only the items with a slightly different-than-normal density that remain scattered throughout.

In order to understand this, we need to view it a bit differently. Let’s approach it in terms of convection. In a liquid, temperature and pressure differentials can create convection currents that move particles around in huge looping patterns. If you treat the mixed nuts as a fluid, convection actually starts to accurately model what's going on. (Scientists call it granular convection.)

As it turns out, both of our previous ideas were almost right. As we move the box around and shake its contents, we force the particles in the middle upward in a current. The particles on the sides then fall into the gaps left by the rising particles in the center. Which is where our first idea comes into play: the smaller particles can fit down into the new gaps more easily, leaving the biggest ones on top.

Found 'em.

We still have the density issue confusing things, though. And this we can't solve quite as easily. We know what happens, and we have an idea how it happens (weirdly enough, density doesn't particularly affect granular convection on this scale if the mixture is in a vacuum), but we still haven't put our fingers on all the whys.

One thing is for sure, though: Cashews are definitely the best. You'd have to be a fool to think otherwise. (Well, the almonds can stay, too.) Brazil nuts and all the rest are just something you have to endure for the sake of the cashews.

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Quotable

Good thing people never run out of things to say. My Quote-Off with that other Yard Ramp Guy continues:

“God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.”

— Franz Kafka