How times change

Valley Art Plan Abandoned (from Lancashire Evening Telegraph): "panopticon "

Of course, when I were a lad, there were no panopticons anywhere in East Lancashire.

rc3.org: Deal or No Deal

rc3.org: Deal or No Deal

I watched the UK version for the first time last night. I agree that it is too long - it's a half hour show dragged out by flim-flam - but it's also interesting that it is a surely purely about maths, and people's lack of understanding of it. The linked articles give more details, but one point that struck me last night was that the element of luck is entirely absent, yet cosntantly pushed. In the game you have to eliminate possible prizes entirely at random, and the prizes are split into low (blue) and high (red).

At one point last nights player had eight blue and four red prizes left, and the host told her she needed some luck to avoid eliminating another high prize. But in reality, the odds were 2-1 on that she would pick a blue prize simply because she was making a random choice from eight blue and four red. Of course, there was still a 33% chance she would have picked red, but althoug in the show that would have been represented as being close to eliminating all the good prizes, in reality it would have just shifted the odds further in favour of a blue pick next time.

As a show, its pretty dull because the only skill the contestant has to show is in decided to deal or not deal every few rounds. But a simple bit of maths (the expected value of the remaining prizes) would give a good steer, and - given that the contestant has to win something and its essentially free money - decideing what is enough does the rest. It seems to me that the banker offers well under the expected value early on, but moves closer later. This of course make sense from the point of view of the producers - they don't want the contestant to quit too early.

Not a great show, but you could teach people a lot about maths from it.

Bike lanes

BBC NEWS | Magazine | In the gutter

My favourite stupid bike lane was on Tottenham Court Road. The left hand lane was a left-turn filter, so a bike in that lane had to turn anyway, but nonetheless there was a bike lane that took the cyclist off the road, onto the pavement (usually crowded with pedestrians), around some street furniture and then to a give way sign so that one could wait to rejoin the traffic you had left only a few seconds before. Sadly this disappeared a few years ago.

There's a another minor classic outside church. There's a traffic island leading into Bathurst Gardens but with a bike gap to allow cyclists through. It dips in the middle so there is a drain, but the drain is halfway up the slope so for most of the year the thing is half-full of water, steadfastly refusing to run uphill.

And don't miss this page of terrible cycle lanes.

Your ideas are boldly nonconformist, yet conveniently reaffirm my desire to do nothing.

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