TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Furcadia is Dead

Furcadia is dead. And it's been dead for a long time, at least 4 years. Look at their statistics on the front page. This game has been around since the start of 1997. I spent at least 3 years in it. It helped improve my writing and imagination, it helped me meet my best friend and others I still talk to frequently, it was a nice, creative form of entertainment that ascended beyond mere point-and-click first-person-shooters.

And yet:
135162 characters connected this month
Max players ever: 4640

I'm going to make a lot of assumptions and guesses, based on things I've heard, read, and experienced. I wouldn't put 95% certainty on any of them but I'd be surprised if I was really far off the mark. This is why I classified this post as a rant and blog fodder.

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Notes from Probability Theory Chapter 1

Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, by the great E.T. Jaynes, has been in my reading queue for quite some time now. Unfortunately for me it's a dense book after the first few chapters, so I've kind of plateaued around chapter 3 while reading from a bunch of other sources.

I've found that my brain is like boiling soup, in a sense, with different things coming up to my attention almost randomly but the important ones usually coming up just-in-time. So now a Jaynes bubble has reappeared and I'm going to review what I've read! If you're interested I highly recommend the actual book, since I'm here going to be sometimes more verbose, sometimes less, sometimes tangential, and always less organized than Jaynes; leave your email in the comment form and I'll send you a PDF copy if you want.

Chapter one begins with this thought-provoking quote:
The actual science of logic is conversant at present only with things either certain, impossible, or entirely doubtful, none of which (fortunately) we have to reason on. Therefore the true logic for this world is the calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability which is, or ought to be, in a reasonable man’s mind.
James Clerk Maxwell (1850)

1.1 - Deductive and Plausible (Inductive) Reasoning (Inference)



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