What did you learn today II

[Littlefingers In The Air]

The other day, I learned some cemeteries could do a hell of a lot better with maintaining graves.

[Recovering forum addict]

Today I learnt about non-transitive dice. I was scouring the web for someone who sold hexadecimal dice (as one does), when I found a link that I clicked on. Non-transitive dice are collections of dice, six-sided like normal ones but with different numberings. As an example (lifted from Wikipedia), imagine three dice, one red, one green and one blue, where the red one has the numbers 2 2 4 4 9 9, the green one has 1 1 6 6 8 8, and the blue one has 3 3 5 5 7 7.

Then, when you roll all three at once, the probability for the red die to get a larger value than the green one is 5/9, the probability for the green die to get a larger value than the blue one is 5/9, and the probability for the blue one to get a larger value than the red one is 5/9. The probabilities are all larger than 1/2. This means that the red one is likely to be larger than the green one which is likely to be larger than the blue one which is likely to be larger than... the red one.

Once you roll the dice and get an actual concrete result this obviously can't happen, since the larger than relation for normal numbers is transitive - if R > G and G > B, then R > B which means that B > R can't be true. But if you roll the dice many times and look at them pairwise, the probabilities manifest themselves in the statistics.

You can have non-transitive sets of dice of any size starting at 3 (2 obviously doesn't work since it can't be true that R is likely to be larger than G and G is likely to be larger than R), and the larger sets you have the closer you can push the probability that one die is larger than another to 3/4, but you can never reach or surpass that.

Mathematical statistics is freaky. This is going to keep me happy for many days.

[Littlefingers In The Air]

Wow. That's kind of awesome.

[eyenon15]

I heard a new word but I have no clue what it means nor how to spell it.

Sounds like "austier" or "ostier" maybe??

The accent was throwing me off.

It was on the show Once Upon a Time. Season 3: episode 14

@11minutes and 26 seconds.

The scene is at Regina's place in Storybrooke. Charming asks if they see anything. Cpt Hook replies "Other than an ?austier? sense of design, nothing"

What is this word?????

[Sophelia]

sounds like 'austere' which would mean minimalist, sparing, non-luxurious, in this context.

ETA: I don't know the show, just lots of words!

[eyenon15]

I guess he was being sarcastic because Regina's place is way fancy and luxurious.

[Theda Baratheon]

I think it was austere yeah and hook being sarcastic. Love that show.

i learnt that i haven't *completely* failed my second year of uni and dont need to retake it.

[Ser Lucious Left-Foot]

I've learned that I can finally play football again after 56 months of not playing. I've had worst days.