time*treat's Blog

Do a search on "pennies melting ban" ... no quotes required.

Often (usually on Election Day) it is hard to tell incompetence from evil.
I have described our "leaders" as clueless s on more than one occasion. Most recently in my $ nevermind $ entry. I see I have mislabeled them.

Incompetence creates problems and hopes someone else will solve them.

Evil creates problems then vilifies & punishes those who try to mitigate the damage & protect themselves from it. 

Part 1 (Entry #10) explained how to use this concept with independent filters that all had about the same success rate. This part will show how to do so with filters that have different success rates from each other. Since the setup math is more involved, fewer filters are used in the example. I'm using 3 filters total. Their success rates are: 80/20, 75/25, and 70/30

Step 1 set up a "truth table" 1 column for each filter and 2^filters rows (2^3 = 8), thus...

step 2: substitute the "pass" and "fail" spaces with your pass/fail ratios...

then multiply across (I added a column for "totals")

Now you have all eight possible outcomes, and their expected rate of occurence.

What happens if you decide you want to drop a filter?

Here's how. Dropping filter 3 and marking out all redundancies in cols 1 and 2 gives this table.

Two filters gives only four possible outcomes. You would call the third filter a "don't care" condition. 

I want to hear from programmers/coders who are using "other" Operating Systems (OSX, *BSD). Is there a trade-off between your code execution speed and whatever made you choose a different OS in the first place?

I'm wondering if anyone has used OpenOffice.org's suite. I'm trying it. It looks promising. Of course my main interest is the Calc app and it's macro programming component.

*Disclaimer* If doing this causes you to get sent to "re-education camp" ... we'll finally meet

Set your browser so that you are "warned" about sites wanting to set a "cookie"

Go over to www(dot)state(dot)gov. You may or may not get a "warning" on the home page.

If you do, read it. If not, scroll down to where it says "travel and business". Click on that (this is where it worked for me). Read the name of the cookie the site wants to set.   

There has been many years of debate over what to do with the lowly penny.

As our money was debased through excessive printing, with nothing to back it other than guns, the copper content of the penny became more valuable than the face value. People worried that all prices would be rounded up to the next nickel. Merchants felt cents were too bulky for their trouble.

Our clue ... *cough* fearless leaders switched from copper to zinc. Well, the debate need rage no more because now even the cheapie zinc cents are worth more at the smelters than at the bank. People who can smell a trend will no longer spend cent coins. My guess is that a market for "bags" of pennies (based on year minted) will emerge like the market for "bags" of pre-1965 Ag coins.

I'll be spending a weekend in Memphis, TN about mid-July. I'd like to know some of the "things to do" from folks familiar with the area.

This is the most disturbing thing I've read in quite some time.

It (for some reason I can't explain) bothers me more than the war stories, suicide bombings, and the immigration debates; even though, materially, those things are far more important.

Maybe it's the accompanying photo, or the choice of words. 

Maybe I'm just having a bad week.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12809975/?GT1=8199

C'mon. Would I leave you hangin'?
 

Sudoku ~ Japanese for "Cure for low blood pressure."

Each column, row, & 3x3 box must contain the numbers 1 to 9.

Ok, back to work. From...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-04-28-mexicodrugs_x.htm 

Mexico votes to legalize small amounts of cocaine, heroin and marijuana.

Did I just hear the sound of flushing in relation to all that "war-on-drugs" money we've given them over the years? What happens when those "small amounts" come across the border by the pocketfull rather than the truckload? Seems to me that it would be harder for our boys to detect (not that several of them haven't been caught on the "take", too).

But don't talk of building a wall. The U.S. gov't will turn their guns on their own citizens to prevent that from happening...unless the illegals start smuggling in Cuban cigars. Then they will defend the U.S. southern boarder with Mexico the way Mexico defends it's southern boarder (but no one will talk about that) with Guatemala.

I know it is said that women are more "complex" than men, but I think I have found an amusing exception.

Scenario: You're making a sandwich. Just as you're placing the top slice of bread on your "Dagwood Special", a fly lands under it and is promptly suffocated in the mayo (or catsup, or mustard). Suffocated, not "smashed". Dead, but "intact".

Question: What do you do with the sandwich?

My theory of initial reactions, not the after-I-thought-about-it-awhile answers:
Most of the women have (already) said "Ewww, toss it out." 

Most of the men have to know at least 2 of the following 3 things before they can answer:

1. How big is this fly? Big housefly-fly or little knat-fly fly?
   
2. What type of sandwich? Roast beef or bologna?
3. Are there enough ingredients to replace any "tainted" parts of the sandwich?
   

Your "assignment" is to read the part in blue to your sig-other get their initial reaction to how they would handle the scenario. If your sig-other is a man, I'm betting he has to ask you a question or 2, before making a decision. If your sig-other is a woman, you may not even be allowed to finish the "question".

How many men said they would pick the little knat out of the roast beef sandwich, and keep eating? 

I have been holding back on writing this, but it just won't go away. 

The following is from the U.S. Mint site, my comments follow

The Composition of the Cent
Following is a brief chronology of the metal composition of the cent coin (penny):

• The composition was pure copper from 1793 to 1837.
• From 1837 to 1857, the cent was made of bronze (95 percent copper, and five percent tin and zinc).
• From 1857, the cent was 88 percent copper and 12 percent nickel, giving the coin a whitish appearance.
• The cent was again bronze (95 percent copper, and five percent tin and zinc) from 1864 to 1962.
      (Note: In 1943, the coin's composition was changed to zinc-coated steel.     This change was only for the year 1943 and was due to the critical use of copper for the war effort.     However, a limited number of copper pennies were minted that year.
  
• In 1962, the cent's tin content, which was quite small, was removed.     That made the metal composition of the cent 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc.
• The alloy remained 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc until 1982, when the composition was changed to 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper (copper-plated zinc).  Cents of both compositions appeared in that year.

If you go back to 1981, the year before the penny started to be made out of the same stuff as multivitamins, you may remember these are rather heavy by value. How heavy? It takes 160 of them (pre-'82) the give you a full pound of copper. That's it. $1.60 in pennies contained a pound of copper. Right now, a pound of copper trades for just under $3.00. And, of course, it takes many more than 160 "new" pennies to get a pound of copper out. Maybe the pennies aren't becoming more expensive, maybe it's the paper currency becoming cheaper. Our new Fed Chairman "Helicopter" Ben Bernanke has promised that deflation (prices decline, therefore dollars buy more goods) will not occur.

Here is an excerpt from his speech in Nov 2002 titled:

... Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation...

I'm of the opinion that there is NOTHING positive about my money losing value. Ever. Hold on to your old pennies... and your old silver coins too. I guess on the way down we will reach parity with the canadian dollar and then the mexican peso. Then we can justify having one United North American currency. (In the name of "freedom", "security" and "democracy", of course) Maybe even call it the "UNA" or better, "El Dolar Norte". When they're done spinning it, the average citizen will be sure it's a wonderful idea. They are letting in those future supporting voters right now. And if you are against it, you will be called a racist xenophobe. Or maybe something will "happen" to you like so often does to opposition candidates in a certain country, south of here.

(an atypical time*treat entry)

I had gotten out of the habit of listening to this station on Saturday nights, as they always had some 60's radical on overnight. Anyone remember the SNL character "The Ladies' Man"? Now add 40 years and 60 pounds.

Anyway, just happened to turn it on, and there was Art Bell. I haven't heard him in a while. He's happier than a kid on Christmas morning. You can feel it through the radio. Contagious, too. Seems Art has himself a new wifey. She's a cutie, too. 20ish. Filipino. Looks like someone won a different type of lottery.

I'm happy for him. Good luck, Art.

I had posted this idea on a thread (without the chart), but it seems as though any serious discussion thread is quickly taken over with junk - "you need luck, that's all there is", "it's all rigged, why bother?!?" - posts anymore.

If you have five relatively independent filters, each with a 90% success rate, you run into the problem that your winning number will "pass" through all 5 filters only about 60% of the time.

I'm using five filters because it is large enough to make the point, but not too large to follow the logic. This will also work for filters that have heterogenous rates of success, but the "turns" have to be calculated separately and summed. You may be able to use the geometric mean to get a good "single value" approximation.

partial credit success rates

As noted before, ~6 of 10 tries will get us a five filter pass. But, now allow for the number to fail any one (and only one) filter; our winner gets another nearly 1 in 3 chances to come through. Over all, we go from just under 60% pass through to just over 90% pass through of the winner. That is a ~50% gain in performance. As the filters approach 100%, the gain is less when going to the "any 4 of 5 method", because you're doing good already. The only thing that has been changed is how the filters are applied, not their values.

This gain will vary with the "beginning" performance of your filters, so don't expect miracles. This won't turn crappy filters into good ones. It just lessens their damage. It's math... not magic.