Archive for weekend
Avignon: papal palace [jatp]
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel with tags 14th Century, antipopes, Avignon, Catholic Church, Clément V, Council of Constance, excommunication, French history, Holy Roman Empire, jatp, Knights Templar, Occitanie, Palais des Papes, papacy, Philippe Le Bel, popes, Provence, ramblings, Rome, South, weekend, Western Schism on May 10, 2025 by xi'an
Avignon: grand view [jatp]
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel with tags 14th Century, Avignon, Île de la Barthelasse, Catholic Church, city walls, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, French history, Holy Roman Empire, jatp, medieval architecture, Occitanie, Palais des Papes, papacy, Pont Saint-Bénézet, popes, Provence, Rhône, Rome, South, Unesco World Heritage List, weekend on May 9, 2025 by xi'an
Houcheanographerc almost making the local news!
Posted in Statistics with tags ambulance, ambulanza, Bormio, Chamonix High Mountain Gendarmerie Platoon, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, crevasse, glacier, helicopter rescue, icefield, ISBA 2024, Les Houches, MCMSki, mountain guide, mountain rescue, news, Ocean, off-track skiing, PGHM, ski accident, Vallée Blanche, Venezia, Venice, weekend, workshop on March 9, 2025 by xi'an
riddle by attrition
Posted in Books, Kids, R with tags geometric series, riddle, The Riddler, weekend on December 2, 2019 by xi'an
The weekend riddle from The Riddler is rather straightforward [my wording and simplification]:
Construct a decimal number X between 0 and 1 by drawing the first digit a¹ uniformly over {0,1,…,9}, the second digit a² uniformly over {0,1,…,9}, &tc., until 0 is attained. What is the expectation of this random variable X?
Since each new digit has expectation half of the previous digit, the expectation is an infinite geometric series with common ratio 20⁻¹ and factor 9, leading to an expectation of 9/19. As verified with the following R code:
skr<-function(){
a=9;b=0
while((a<-sample(rep(0:a,2),1))>0)b=10*b+a
while(b>=1)b=b/10
return(b)}
blue skies over Batignoles [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Travel with tags Batignoles, Batignolles-Monceau, city walk, Clichy, France, jatp, Paris, weekend on February 23, 2018 by xi'an
