When you were growing up, what were the rules for Jinx? Please weigh in.

Poll #1501809 Would You Rather...
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Would you rather...

One of my favorite improv games when played well (and the worst when played poorly) is "foreign film dub". You get people on stage, have them pretend to speak a foreign language, and then other players translate what they said. I was reminded of it recently by a video that went out to the Improv mailing list at Google of an Italian actor writing a song in fake English.

And no description of this game is complete without a link to a Sid Caesar video. The man is a comic genius.

So, I already put this up on Twitter, but I'm fooling around with a new service called Formspring, which is one of those "ask me anything" question sites with both an anonymous and a named option. I'm benj on the site. Pays to get in early. :-)

Also, zixi comes to town Tuesday! I know she's in town for a conference and theoretically won't have tons of time to spend doing fun not-science-y things, but it'll be so good to see her again!

Here's the problem from my test today that I just couldn't manage to wrap my head around.

1. (15 points) Probability Bound. Let Y ≥ 1 be a positive random variable with mean 2. Conditoned on Y, let X be exponentially distributed with mean 1 - e^(-Y) / Y.

a. (5 points) Determine E(e^X|Y).
b. (10 points) Show that P(X - Y > a) ≤ 2/e^a for any a, -inf < a < inf. Hint: Use the results from part a.

Part a is straightforward, but the algebra involved will make you tear your hair out. My advice is to substitute lambda = 1 - e^(-y)/y and then do it. I still managed to screw it up, but that saves all the junk for the very end. (The integral is wrt X, so lambda = f(y) is irrelevant.)

The hard part is b. The people I've shown the problem have all ended up with answers that required more knowledge of the distribution of Y (especially Law of Iterated Expectations type stuff). I think it's either a tricky Jensen's Inequality question or a tricky Markov Inequality question, but I can't tell which. Which leads me to believe that this question may get tossed out. I work with some pretty smart cookies. :-)

An interesting article from the San Francisco Chronicle on Michael Tilson Thomas' baton. Notice the way they're lovingly described by length, material and origin.

I should be writing about the Big Questions I've been thinking about recently, but instead you get this list. I hope you enjoy it. Here's a metaphorical list of the books on my nightstand, stuff that if I had the spare time to sit and read, I'd be in the middle of.

( Knowledged! )

mackenzie and I went last night to a musical about my hometown. Which, I didn't know was going to be a musical about my hometown until I got there. It was Let It Snow: An Improvised Musical, and it was pretty great.

We voted at the top of the show on whose hometown we would see a story about. A town with a flea market, a town with a 400 piece marching band, or a town with an azalea festival, and Mercer Island's staggeringly large band took the day.

We got to see the travails of two Mercer Island teenagers dealing with the stress of working at the Lion's Club christmas tree lot and Casa D's, the social ostracism that comes with *not* being in the band (even if they secretly are the Mercer Island Gorilla), and two overly eager engineering parents. (They totally resonated with me, trying to make every mundane thing that their kids did into a "learning experience"/scavenger hunt/engineering activity.) And questionably the best moment of the night, a marching band number where the "band director" kept asking the other 5 cast members to change formations long past the number of formations you can get from 5 people.

And would you believe it, the brother and sister resolved their differences and marched together as two gorillas at the Christmas parade. It even snowed.

A talented cast of improvisers on the whole with a couple of standouts: some great character work from Trish Tillman (as the mom and a creaky old lady at the Christmas tree lot) and Scott Keck (the everyman of the show who did delightfully and unexpectedly wacky things with the mad-scientist engineer dad), and great vocal work from Christian Utzman. This show suffers a little bit from a rotating cast, particularly in ensemble musical numbers and some plotlines which were clear to the audience getting trampled on by improvisers who just weren't paying enough attention.

This is a great show, and you can get a deal on tickets through Goldstar. I recommend it, and if you're going to see it, I'd totally go again. :-)

A very good article from New York Magazine on the future of product integration. And to wash that down, some of the classic 30 Rock Product Placement moments.

I'm an adult and a trained scientist, and yet I'm still surprised sometimes by the notion of time zones. Some part of me assumes that everywhere it's the same time.

Also My San Jose Tech Webpage.