Thanks. Why can't all math teachers talk like that? I mean... I know you're clever and all, but if you were really clever you'd explain it in a way that's easy to understand.
Still, kudos to the OP. That was a great attempt to be precise.
Still, kudos to the OP. That was a great attempt to be precise.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16470358
> The hitchhiker's paradox is correct, taking a point and looking backward or forward will correctly give an average event 10 minutes away, but combining the events to give an average of 20 minutes is false.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16471544
> I thought this sounded funny, and I did a little simulation to see if it was correct. Given his assumptions (poisson with lambda 10), you do not get that answer. I got right around 10, which is what I would expect.
Consider buses which arrive every ten minutes, exactly. You arrive at the bus stop at a random time. How long should you expect to wait? Not 10 min but 5 min, on average. You are equally likely to arrive at any point during the 10 minutes wait.
Now change the buses to a Poisson process with mean rate 1 bus every 10 minutes. Now you arrive during an interval of average length 20 min, but wait on average 10 min.
Being able to explain/teach something to others is a very different skill to understanding it and isn't compulsory.
You guys would love Richard Feynman.
That collection is a series of lectures from Feynman, and his characteristic clarity, on physics across the breadth of all major topics. It's quite amazing to realize how little you, in general, truly understand even really basic concepts like the conservation laws until you read the writings of a person who did genuinely understand what he was talking about and could share that insight in such a uniquely effective way.