If you’re like me, you like to doodle fun patterns. One of my favorite things to doodle is an “impossible triangle” that looks like three straight bars meeting in right angles, which can’t exist in real life: But I had trouble drawing an impossible triangle from memory, until through trial and error I came up with this … More How to draw an impossible triangle
On billboards, during movie theater previews, among those ads for lawyers and ESL teachers on public transit—I love coming across instances of the “Your advertisement could be here!” filler that advertising companies use when their advertising space goes unfilled. For one thing, I’m tickled by the meta-ness of advertising for advertising. For another, some of the more creative … More Your Advertisement Here!
This is my take on a classic probability paradox, the case of Sleeping Beauty. Along the way I’ll explain what I think is wrong with a classic rule of inference, Bayes’ Rule, and what needs to be done to fix it, but I hope you enjoy the paradox even if you don’t have a background in … More The Sleeping Beauty Paradox
I have lots of questions about the world every day. Where did I put my keys? Is my phone battery dead? Is there enough food in the fridge that I don’t need to go grocery shopping yet? (Maybe you can tell what kind of life I lead right now.) But one of the most common … More Which self am I?
Today’s post is a short paradox about averages, and how they don’t always match expectations. Imagine you’re a freshman college student, happily confident of a personalized education—after all, your college boasts an average class size of a mere 10 students per course. But when you arrive, most of your classes have far more students than … More The class size paradox
Owen Biesel 