Blessed by the Potato

All the crazy people are making a break for it today. We’ve had a code red (fire), two code whites (violent person) and two code yellows (missing patient).

Our Halloween party this year was pretty lame. Wayfare, formerly renouned for throwing THE Halloween party to addend, had hardly anyone respond to her invitation. Of those who did come, none really dressed up, and no one wanted to go out as per the original plan (not even to Rol San, which is extremely surprising for Joce). There was lots of junk food, though, and Shaun of the Dead, so it wasn’t a complete write-off.

Worst of all, though, is that we ended the party so early that we never got around to getting our extra hour, which was half the fun of having a Halloween Saturday party night!

The next day, Wayfare & I had completely forgotten about the time shift, and hadn’t changed any clocks (oddly enough, my laptop didn’t give me that “your time has been changed…” popup). We wanted to see Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D, so we rushed out to the theatre, and it was only when we were in the car that the radio reminded us about the whole daylight savings thing. That gave us some time to hit the Shoppers Drug Mart for some discounted candy and more Halloween decorations (I believe we are now up to 11 file boxes full of Halloween decorations. Our apartment is fairly thickly decorated, and we’ve only touched 4 of the boxes; none of them was completely emptied).

Anyhow, so eventually we get to the theatre in the middle of nowhere to see NBC3-D. And I’d like to say that it was really, really dumb of the theatres to not release this cult Halloween classic on any screen in the downtown area on Halloween weekend. Even way up in Woodbridge the theatre was packed for a Sunday matinee: how much business could they have got from the pre/post Halloween Saturday club crowd if they showed it at Paramount? But nnoooooo, Paramount was showing Open Range in 3-D instead. I wonder if anyone bothered to go…

Back to the point, the theatre was fairly full. Wayfare & I sat near the back and watched the show. There were two empty seats beside us, but garbage had been left there from the last show, so no one wanted to sit there while the lights were up. 40 minutes late (just about the halfway point for NBC), two people show up and plop down beside us with a tonne of food. They had nachos, burger king, popcorn, and a strong smell of beer (though I couldn’t say for sure whether they were just unshowered from the night before, or had snuck beer into a matinee). They talked through the whole movie, and made a giant mess of their seats when they left, right down to spilled nacho cheese. It was just astoundingly rude, and I was really close to actually telling them off, except the kids behind us were kicking their seats with reckless abandon, which was pretty entertaining (until they started kicking mine, too).

A day later though, and I’m still left wondering: why show up to a 2:30 movie at 3:10? Why not just wait until 4:45 and actually see both halves of your $13 movie? And if you walk into a theatre that full, that late, and with that much food, why not bite the bullet and plop down in the neckbreakers up front rather than running up and down the stairs for an aisle seat, or pushing past people who are trying to enjoy the movie?

As for the movie itself: I don’t think the 3-D aspect added anything to it. It was already claymation which does tend to “look” 3-D even on flat screens (at least, a bit more than much cel animation), and those 3-D glasses are a little nauseating when worn overtop of my regular glasses. However, it was nice to see it up on the big screen for Halloween weekend, and I’m rather surprised that sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. Rocky Horror gets shown every year like clockwork, but fall is usually a somewhat slow time for the theatres (usually they see the desperate, re-edited/re-shot dregs that couldn’t quite manage a summer release), so I think they might actually do better putting some classic Halloween movies like this (and other horrors) up on one or two screens of the multiplexes… and in areas that are actually close to the demographics that enjoy that sort of thing (i.e.: not woodbridge).

I ran into this logic puzzle the other day, and have been thinking about it a lot between Nyquil comas. I will try to explain it as best I can here, but be warned that there are pages of discussion and argument on this as people try to wrap their brains around it. If you want to think about it on your own for a while, then stop reading here.

So, to start with, I’m going to drop the numbers down from what is presented on the xkcd page: let’s say there are 20 people in this weird tribe of logicians, and 5 of them have blue eyes. This better matches the forum discussion, and makes the numbers easier to follow.

A group of people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians — if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. No one knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. If anyone has figured out the color of their own eyes, they [must] leave the island that midnight. Everyone can see everyone else at all times and keeps a count of the number of people they see with each eye color (excluding themselves), but they cannot otherwise communicate. Everyone on the island knows all the rules in this paragraph.

On this island there are 5 blue-eyed people, 15 brown-eyed people, and the Guru (she happens to have green eyes). So any given blue-eyed person can see 15 people with brown eyes and 4 people with blue eyes (and one with green), but that does not tell him his own eye color; it could be 16 brown and 4 blue. Or 15 brown, 4 blue, and he could have red eyes.

The Guru is allowed to speak once (let’s say at noon), on one day in all their endless years on the island. Standing before the islanders, she says the following:

“I can see someone who has blue eyes.”

Who leaves the island, and on what night?

The answer, [Spoilers!] to start with, is that the blue eyed people would all leave the island together on the 5th night.

The logic looks inductive: if there was one person with blue eyes, they would see a sea of brown eyes, and the gurus words would speak to him, and him alone: he does not see anyone with blue eyes, so therefore he must be the one with blue eyes the guru was speaking about; he would leave the first night. If no one leaves the first night, then everyone knows that everyone else saw at least one other person with blue eyes, so they could not conclude that they were the only one and leave. If there is anyone who only sees one person with blue eyes, then they know that they must also have blue eyes, because otherwise that lone blue eyed person would have left (i.e.: the blue eyed person must have seen someone else with blue eyes, namely them). For every extra blue eyed person, the departure date is delayed one day. If no one left the second night, then there must be three blue eyed people, so anyone who only saw two blued eyed people would leave on the third night.

There are then a few more questions. The first: what information did the guru really add? The guru made it so that not only did everyone see people with blue eyes, she made it so everyone knew everyone knew that there were blue eyes.

The logic proceeds thusly: A person with blue eyes (say #5) sees 4 other people with blue eyes, but may assume that they have brown eyes. So #5 thinks that #4 sees 3 other people with blue eyes, and thinks that #4 thinks #3 sees 2 others; #5 thinks that #4 thinks that #3 thinks that #2 only sees one other, and thus #5 thinks that #4 thinks that #3 thinks that #2 thinks that #1 sees only brown eyed logicians.

The chain of logic is absolutely insane, since #5 knows, directly, that each of #’s 1-4 must see at least 3 others, because he can see all 4 of them. But nonetheless, he knows that each makes those assumptions down the chain. The trick is that at the end of the chain, someone thinks that someone only sees brown, which doesn’t help them guess their eye colour, since they don’t necessarily know that there is at least one blue present [or rather, they don’t think that someone else thinks that they think that they know… ok, it’s making my head hurt follow those chains of reasoning]. Once the guru speaks up, everyone knows that everyone at the bottom of their chains of reasoning knows that blue exists, and thus would deduce their eye colour if the twisted logic played out. It starts the countdown so that by day five, the 5 blue eyed people up and board the ferry.

It really makes my head spin to try to follow all that, especially since I sometimes have problem with the “a pencil” problems to begin with. But here’s the thing that I wonder: following the chain of logic, you know that if no one leaves the first night, it means that the blue eyed people all saw at least one other blue eyed person. Following the chain of guessing what you think the next guy thinks the next guy thinks, you get to the point where the last person hanging in that chain might think they were the only ones and actually leave the first night. So if no one does, that’s new information to act on. But, you also know, in addition to the crazy deduction, that everyone else sees at least one other blue. So no one expects anyone to leave that first night; in that case, is the fact that no one does leave actually new information? Does the chain of reason really continue night after night until they call all leave on the fifth? In fact, with 5 blues there are enough that you can know that not only does everyone else see at least one other blue, but you can know that they know everyone else can see at least one other. Can you move to the next step of waiting for someone to leave on day 4 if you knew nothing would ever happen on day 1?

The leaves are barely halfway through changing for the fall, and already we’ve got a snowstorm here:

I actually took the photo fairly early on in the snow, when I thought it was a freak thing we’d never see again. Since then, it’s gotten dark, and the snow is accumulating out there.

I’m not talking about dates as in the stuff that happens before the awkward 5 minute silence as you clumsily try to say goodnight on the doorstep, I’m talking about the day of the month, in numeric form. Many people prefer a date format that looks like DD-MM-YY (or YYYY) since it’s a nice progression from short time periods to longer ones. Still others prefer YYYY-MM-DD for the same reasons, and also because it sorts nicely on a computer (plus if you see a date format that has 4 numbers at the front, it’s very hard to get confused about which standard you’re using). Other people (apparently Americans/Canadians for the most part) prefer a MM-DD standard; I know for a long time that was the standard I used.

This standard, some say, is peculiar. Now, I must admit that it does cause confusion, and there have been a number of rough Aprils spent looking at expiry dates on food and trying to figure out whether it was March 5th or May 3rd… but I don’t think the format is so confusing. It meshes well with the way we format our time (HH:MM), that is from larger to smaller divisions. And since the month is usually the most important thing to look for when going through a set of papers, it makes sense to put it first (typically you can remember the month you did something in but not the exact date, and papers from different years will likely be in different folders). It also follows the way we tend to say the dates: March fifth versus the fifth of March or five March (though those last two forms, particularly the middle one, do appear with some regularity).

Of course, in saying that I find that I’m at a complete loss to explain why ten dollars gets the dollar sign put in front ($10).

Do you ever find yourself caught… trapped somehow in that hazy time period between 2 and 4 am, uselessly pondering things that not only can you not change: but that also don’t matter in the slightest? Yeah, me neither… though I have started to wonder if I had a small stroke or something, because my typing has gone hugely downhill all of a sudden this last week. I thought that maybe something got into my keyboard at work, but tonight I’ve found the same problem at home: tonnes of typos (far above and beyond what is normal for me), particularly with the way my two hands sync together, and the way my thumb syncs with the rest of my typing: my spaces are often coming a character or two too soon or too late. Or maybe I’m just over tired and my hands are clumsy.

My point, and I shall make it shortly so that you can finish this post and go back to not sleeping, is that “The Peculiar Date Standards of Americans” WMAGNFARB.

Oh, and I really need to get a good short story finished in the next few weeks, and I haven’t even had any half decent ideas to write on sticky notes and lose in the last little while…

I think that my cat is making me stupid. I just simply spend too much time alone with the creature, speaking in monosyllables or baby-talk.

Plus she’s just such a pretty kitty that I want to roll over and take a nap, or maybe purr a little.