Posted by:
rodmalm
at Fri Apr 30 23:11:47 2004 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by rodmalm ]
Guess what Frank, I am a huge fan of statistics! LOL -- They are never wrong, they can't be. They are just a tool that some people don't understand or use correctly.
Actually, If you flip enough coins, you will eventually come up with 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 heads in a row. You may have to flip that coin hundreds of trillions of times, but these scenarios will all happen eventually. And you won't be up all night flipping coins, you will be flipping coins for many years. Your life probably isn't even long enough for the 10,000 heads in a row to occur, but that doesn't mean that it won't. It's basically the philosophical argument that if you place an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters, one of them will eventually write "War and Peace". More importantly, the more flips that occur, the greater likely hood that you will reach 50/50 result. After all, if you just flip the coin an odd number of times, you can never reach a 50/50 result. For instance, if you flip just once, you will get 100% heads or tails, if you flip 3 times, your best result will be 66.6%, if you flip 101 times, your best result becomes a ratio of 50:51, etc. If you flip 1,000,001 times, your best result will be 50:50.0001. The probability that you achieve a 50/50 result goes up with more flips, but the chances on any one flip is still 50/50, and the results will always be 50/50 on average. Just because you haven't met the average yet, doesn't mean it isn't true.
As for your father, he could just as easily have produced heads as he did tails. This trick is based on the rotation rate and time that the coin is in the air. It can easily be manipulated, but we were talking about something that people can't influence. And even if your father did this (I know he could, I have done it myself, though not a master at it), why would his results (with him trying to manipulate the flip) be different this year compared to any other year? That is the beauty of the analysis I did, I was comparing data between different years, not heat waves that occurred within any one particular year. If he achieved 80% heads last year, all things being the same (his skill level at doing this), he would achieve similar results this year, or the year previous.
As for your theory of warmer winters and nights that are still cold enough to keep snow/glaciers frozen, I like it, but I don't buy it. Ice can be much colder than 32 degrees. Thus, it will be much closer to its melting point when the air is above 32. For instance, if it is cold enough in one place so that one glacier is at 2 degrees, while another is at 31 degrees, the one at 31 will melt significantly during the day were air temps are at 35 degrees, while the one at 2 degrees won't melt at all. So a massive melt, all of the sudden, from this would not happen.--good thinking though.
Here's one from me. (Please don't let Pulatus see this!-LOL ) Since we know that most green house gas warming is from water vapor (95%), and most extreme heat waves seem to also be very dry air (at least where I live--we don't get the humid heat like many other places), maybe it is the dryness of the air that reduces the global warming effect, causing most of the warming that is seen to occur happen when it is cold to moderate.
Here's another one, we know that there are a lot more trees than there used to be, due to improved fire fighting techniques and anti-logging environmentalists, etc. Trees produce a lot of water vapor. Maybe if there is global warming, it is due to all the added water vapor that these trees make, and not from any man made source, other than our conservation efforts backfiring.
(hehe----I can hear pulatus screaming now! 
Just curious, but did you notice how Pulatus tried to debase my statistical analysis by calling it funny, and an overly simplistic high school math analysis that he understood completely, and then he ran to this forum to try and challenge people to answer why my analysis was wrong because he couldn't. So silly.
Rodney
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RE: Flipping......flipping.....flipping - rodmalm, Fri Apr 30 23:11:47 2004