Year: 2002

Objective vs Subjective Probability

Determinism, Chaos and Quantum Mechanics [PDF]. Interesting 30-pager by Jean Bricmont. He begins by differentiating predictability from determinism, and proceeds to explain how chaos theory supports determinism by enhancing predictability.

As an interesting aside, Bricmont’s article points out that there are 2 kinds of probabilities. Objective probability is where I know that if I toss a fair coin enough times, it’ll turn up heads 50% of the time. Subjective probability is where I think there’s a 10% chance it’ll rain tomorrow, and I don’t care to repeat the event. The former is an informed statement about a system. The latter is our best guess about an event. The former number is a constant, if we’ve done the calculations right. The latter number can change as our knowledge of the event increases.

Keep your desk cluttered

Interesting article on The Economist on the value of a cluttered desk.

… the assumption that filers can find stuff more quickly is wrong. Filers, they say, “are less likely to access a given piece of data, and more likely to acquire extraneous data…”

(There’s a “Clean your desk” initiative at BCG Mumbai going on right now.)

Virtual keyboard

Virtual Keyboard

Cool picture of a virtual keyboard. The article talks about a purely optical keyboard. You move your fingers, and the “keyboard” detects what you’re typing. Now, if optics are that advanced, they should be able to figure out what I’m writing and put that on the computer. So I won’t need a digital pad — I’ll just write on paper. Or even better, project the screen! Then I’ll just carry a little 1″ x 1″ x 1″ box that’ll project a virtual screen that I can draw / write on.