How I spend my lunch breaks.

[nanila]

One of my work colleagues, whom I'll call Lab Mate 1 (LM1) decided to insert a probability puzzle into our lunchtime conversation earlier this week.

LM1: "Hey, have you guys heard of the Monty Hall problem?"

We shook our heads. LM1 then explained the Monty Hall problem to us, which runs like this (excerpt blatantly stolen from Wikipedia):

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1 [but the door is not opened], and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Me: "Wait, what if you want to keep the goat? Can you do that?"
LM2: "Yes, what is market value for a goat? Cars depreciate really quickly. I bet goats don't."
LM3: "And what if you already have a car, but you happen to have an overgrown lawn? Then you'd want a goat."

LM1 looked at us in despair. "I don't feel you all are entering into the spirit of this game."

Comments

[yvi]

Well, it's better than the endless discussions about how "yes, switching really is better. No, your intuition really is wrong." :)

[nanila]

We did eventually have a serious discussion about it, but it wasn't acrimonious. I gave my instinctive answer before we reasoned through it - which was, of course, completely wrong. :)

[chickenfeet]

If goats bayed rather than bleated I could wring a joke out of this

[nanila]

We could switch from goats to wolves. Then it would work.

[lark_ascends]

*giggles*

Ahhh, I remember that problem from Numb3rs.

[nanila]

Whoa, TV that teaches statistics problems? Mind is blown. (See icon: apply to television.)

[lark_ascends]

Heeeeeeeeee.

Well, Numb3rs was half-centred around a mathematician, physicist, and a computer scientist, and did reasonably well with explaining concepts and showing that geeks didn't have to be ugly.

[azurelunatic]

Look! Shiny!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUgbcBZxmnE


Also, if the goat were Frank the Goat, it would entirely depend on whether it was Classic Frank or Creepy Frank.

[nanila]

Oh wow, I love the way they illustrated that. :)

You're right. It would only be safe to stick for Classic Frank.

[crystalpyramid]

I think you just won the internet.

[nanila]

I wonder if I can swap it for a pet goat...

[floating_coffin]

Not surprisingly, my co-workers and I spend our lunch breaks discussing, laughing at, and correcting English signs with spelling and grammar mistakes that we see around the city (and in China there are MANY of these "Chinglish" signs to be seen, believe me). If we're not doing that then we're watching Monty Python sketches on our office computer and quoting them to confused students.

[nanila]

Imagine if we got our two groups together for lunch. I suspect hijinks and hilarity would ensue.

[floating_coffin]

Well, we sometimes get a bit weird, as teachers often do. For example, one afernoon the four of us decided we'd amuse ourselves between classes by reciting the infamous Monty Python "Spam Sketch," but we replaced the word "spam" with a word randomly chosen from the dicitionary (which ended up being "prostate"). There we sat, four college-educated intellectuals, saying, "prostate and egg, egg and prostate, prostate and chips, and bacon with sausage and prostate," etc etc. So, if you lot can hang with conversation like that then I'd say a union of our groups over lunch sounds splendid. No pork, though.

[surexit]

You're entering into the spirit of an EVEN MORE AWESOME game. :D

[nanila]

That's what I thought! A game like Final Fantasy VII except with goats instead of chocobos.