i.justrealized

Ah this is quite interesting, an excerpt from Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, page 159:

The Birthday Paradox

The most intuitive way to describe the data mining problem to a non-statistician is through what is called teh birthday paradox, though it is not really a paradox, simply a perceptional oddity. If you meet someone randomly, there is a one in 365.25 chance of you sharing their birthday, and a considerably smaller one of having the exact birthday of the same year. So, sharing the same birthday would be coincidental event that you would discuss at the dinner table. Now let us look at a situation where there are 23 people in a room. What is the chance of there being 2 people with the same birthday? About 50%. For we are not specifying which people need to share a birthday; any pair works.

Now 50% is really high chance! Bet you never thought of that. Well, you could read more at Wikipedia for the exact math of The Birthday Problem or the Birthday Attack.

Number of people searching for ‘justrealized prawn’ in the past one month:

Why would someone search this type of thing? I get 60 visits the past month from people search this. One of the strange keywords in this blog.

I’m surprised that so many people actually use email. If it’s 18% that didn’t use email, it’s about 82% using email. Are that many people using email? No, but they used email before.

It would be interesting if the number of emails sent per day can be tracked somehow. I think the number of emails sent per day, per person, would be declining.

20% of U.S. Has Never Sent E-mail

A recent phone survey of U.S. households by Parks found 20 million households are without Internet access, approximately 18 percent of all U.S. households.

“Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document,” said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates, in a statement. “These data underscore the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer.”

Age and education are factors in this divide, Park found. One-half of those who have never used e-mail are over 65, and 56 percent had no schooling beyond high school. (Source: PC World)

Why I don’t like email

My email is full of spam and even with the Gmail mail spam filters, some spam still get through. Email is too vulnerable to spam. There’s this saying that the internet is created by a bunch of good people and they haven’t thoroughly thought about how their protocols can be possibly abused - it’s true.

Especially today when developers are so eager in pushing out new products just to be the first, sometimes they missed out tiny little details and made the product exploitable by people with ill intentions.