Archive for the 'Memories' Category

The Coinflipper’s Dilemma

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 8, 2014
in Economics, Game Theory, Memories and Personal
. 9 Comments

flipperThis is the story of how I came to write a little paper called The Coinflipper’s Dilemma.

When I was in high school, my English teacher must have had a free period at the time when my math class met, because every day he would march into the math class and empty his pockets on the table, whereupon my math teacher did the same. Then whoever had put down the most money scooped up everything on the table.

I am ashamed to admit that it took me until this summer to think about computing the equilibrium strategy is in that game.

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Walter Oi, 1929 – 2013

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 26, 2013
in Anecdotes, Economics, Heroes and Memories
. 19 Comments

A long time ago, when I had just started teaching at the University of Rochester, a blind man marched into my office, adopted a commanding stance, and announced in a booming voice that “it takes 150 condoms to prevent one birth in India”. Then he turned on his heels and marched out, leaving me to wonder what he had divided into what to get that number.

That’s what it was like working with Walter Oi, who died peacefully in his sleep on Christmas Eve after a long illness. Walter loved odd facts, and he loved to share them. It was Walter who told me that when all frozen pies had 12 inch diameters, apple was the most popular flavor — but when 7 inch pies came on the market, apple immediately fell to something like fifth place. His explanation: When you’re buying a 12 inch pie, the whole family has to agree on a flavor, and apple wins because it’s everyone’s second choice. With 7 inch pies, family members each get their pick, and almost nobody chooses apple.

Walter loved facts so much that he sometimes invented new ones, because the world could always use more. One day he walked into the department coffee room and announced that “A one hundred pound man and a three hundred pound man have exactly the same quantity of blood.” When this was met with considerable skepticism, Walter responded as he always responded to skepticism — by repeating himself more forcefully: “A one hundred pound man and a three hundred pound man have EXACTLY the same quantity of blood”.

In those pre-Internet days, some of us owned a device called an “encyclopedia”, which was sort of like a hardcopy printout of Wikipedia, but with fewer Simpsons references. A couple of my more enterprising colleagues went home and checked their encyclopedias that night, and came back the next morning to report that according to authoritative sources, a man’s blood volume is roughly proportional to his body weight. Walter’s response: “Nope. A one hundred pound man and a three hundred pound man have EXACTLY the same quantity of blood.”

If you watched carefully and didn’t blink, you might have caught him suppressing a smile.

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The Best Toy Ever, Reimagined

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 30, 2013
in Cool Stuff, Memories and Technology
. 7 Comments

In The Big Questions, I wrote about an absolutely wonderful toy I had as a child. The Digi-Comp I was a completely mechanical computer; it ran on springs and rubber bands, and you built it yourself from a kit. You programmed it by placing little plastic cylinders (cut from drinking straws) on appropriate tabs, and you pushed a lever to run the program. The back of the computer was completely exposed, so you could watch the cylinders and straws and rubber bands push each other around — and see for yourself how those motions implemented the logic of your program and produced a result. As I wrote in The Big Questions, a child with a Digi-Comp I is a child with deep insight into what makes a computer work.

I am delighted that the Digi-Comp I is, after a 40 year hiatus, back on the market, though the modern version substitutes laminated binders board (i.e. high quality cardboard) for plastic. There is, I think, no better gift for a kid who likes computers, or likes logic, or likes knowing how things work.

Now an old friend (who shares my fond memories of this toy) writes to point me to yet another reincarnation of the DigiComp I — as a Lego project! Way cool.

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A Tale Told By an Idiot

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 22, 2011
in Books, Favorites and Memories
. 21 Comments

In sixth grade, I did not read My Side of the Mountain, though it was assigned for class. In eighth grade, I did not read Little Women and in ninth grade I did not read Great Expectations and The Good Earth. As I passed through high school, I worked my way through much of the western canon, not reading The Scarlet Letter, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Return of the Native, and dozens more. In eleventh grade, we were assigned two books by Steinbeck, two by Hemingway, two by Sinclair Lewis and two by William Faulkner. I did not read the Steinbeck, Hemingway or Lewis but for some long-forgotten reason I violated years of established tradition by tackling the Faulkner — specifically As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.

As I Lay Dying went down pretty easily, but I remember many nights struggling my way through The Sound and the Fury, Cliff notes at my side. It felt like scaling Everest, and the vistas at the top were worth the climb.

A couple of weeks ago, as part of my ongoing project to read great novels, I decided to revisit The Sound and the Fury, and I’m more than glad I did; I finally have an answer to give the next time I’m asked what one novel I’d bring to a desert island. But what I’m flabbergasted by is this: How did this book ever get assigned to high school students in the first place? I ask for at least two reasons:

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The Intellectual and the Marketplace

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 17, 2011
in Blogging, Economics and Memories
. 40 Comments

stiglerToday is the 100th birthday of the late George Stigler, who won a Nobel prize for his economics and would have won a second if they gave one for dry wit. This is not the best example of that wit, but it’s the one I remember most vividly: One day long ago I was walking across the quadrangle at the University of Chicago, when I felt a hand on my shoulder — a very large hand, because Stigler was a very large man (in the tall-and-lanky sense of large). He’d been away for a few months, so I was a little surprised to see him. Before I could say anything like “Welcome back”, Stigler asked me: “So, what’s become of that young lady you were squiring around before I left town?”. In a fit of circumspection, all I said was “Oh, she still exists”, and Stigler immediately replied, “Oh, how lovely. You know, I’ve never been a subscriber to this theory that says you should destroy them when you leave them.”

The Intellectual and the Market Place — Stigler’s classic defense of the marketplace against the discomfort felt by so many intellectuals — is well worth a quick read. Parts of it have been paraphrased so often by so many imitators that they’ve begun to seem almost trite, but none of the imitators has ever achieved Stigler’s panache. Besides, it’s been imitated so much precisely because there’s so much here worth saying. A few sample paragraphs to whet your appetite:

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Speed Math

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 16, 2010
in Math, Memories and Uncategorized
. 35 Comments

speedometerOver the course of my childhood, I remember asking exactly one intelligent question. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my parents understand what I was asking. Perhaps it was that frustration that deterred me from ever formulating an intelligent question again.

I was, I think, six years old at the time, and my question was this: If you’re traveling at 50 miles an hour at 1:00, and you’re traveling at 70 miles an hour at 2:00, must there be a time in between when you’re traveling exactly 60 miles an hour?

What made this question intelligent—and probably what made it incomprehensible to my parents—was that I was very keen to distinguish it from the question of whether your speedometer would have to pass through the 60-mile-an-hour mark. It seemed clear to me that the answer to that one was yes—that even if your true velocity could somehow skip directly from 50 to 70, the speedometer needle, in the course of whipping around from one reading to the other, would have to pass through the midpoint.

I quite vividly remember worrying that my question about your speed would be misinterpreted as a question about your speedometer, a question to which I thought the answer was obvious and therefore could only be asked by a very stupid person—a very stupid person for whom I did not wish to be mistaken. Therefore I prefaced the question with a long discourse on how it was thoroughly obvious to me that if your speedometer reads 50 miles an hour at one time and 70 miles an hour at another, then surely it must pass through 60 on the way, but that this was not not not not not the question I was about to ask, which concerned your actual speed and not the measurement thereof. By the time I got around to formulating the question itself, my parents (or at least my father; I don’t remember whether my mother was present) had quite understandably given up on figuring out what I was trying to get at.

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The Book With All the Answers

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 29, 2010
in Memories, Musings, Progress and Progress2
. 11 Comments

bunnyDo you remember Mister Bunny Rabbit?. He was a friend of Captain Kangaroo. One day long ago, when I still measured my age in single digits, Mister Bunny Rabbit announced that he owned a book containing the answer to every possible question. I was skeptical about that book, and so was the Captain, who scoffed mightily at the notion. By way of a test, he looked up the question “Where is Mister Green Jeans right now?”. The book’s answer was “In the attic”, which the Captain knew (I forget how) could not possibly be right. While the Captain was still gloating, Mister Green Jeans ambled in and mentioned that he’d just come from the attic.

The Captain was amazed, and so was I. Long into adulthood, I pondered how that book could possibly have known where Mister Green Jeans was. The best answer I ever got was from the journalist Chris Suellentrop, who speculated that it was probably one of those quantum mechanical things where the act of asking the question caused both the book and Mister Green Jeans to settle down from a cloud of possibilities into mutually compatible states. Others—not so very long ago—speculated that perhaps the book was controlled by a satellite operating a surveillance camera.

Nowadays, of course, we can all carry that book in our pockets. I wonder if today’s children would find anything particularly magical about a reference work that has the answers to pretty much everything, and updates them on the fly.

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NOW I Get It!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 29, 2010
in Books and Memories
. 7 Comments

ctcoverFor some decades now, at more or less random times and in more or less random places, I’ve been asking people “Why would you care if your baby’s name reads the same upside down as rightside up?”. I have never gotten an answer that rang true.

One of the various unsatisfactory answers I keep getting is something like: “Umm. You wouldn’t care.” But I know that’s wrong, because I’ve read Clown Town.

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Moral Education

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 19, 2010
in Ethics and Memories
. 57 Comments

tower-of-babelWhen I was a child, my parents spoke to me frequently about the evils of racism. Some people, they said, judge others by the color of their skin, but we don’t do that, and you mustn’t either. And when you meet the people who make those judgments—and you will, they told me—you must never ever ever give them an ounce of credence because we’re right and they’re wrong. There were many discussions of this topic, but in my memory they all ended with the same refrain. We’re right and they’re wrong.

I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I must have been very young because I already knew the refrain by heart when my father first told me about foreign languages. In other countries, people use different words than we do. We say “cat”, but in Spain they say “gato” and in Russia they say “koschka”.

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