Over at www.developertesting.com, I wrote about the Monty Hall problem and how I was convinced of the answer by an unused variable in my Java simulation.

Markus wrote a nice simulation in Squeak (dunno what it will do if you don’t have squeak installed but it makes a good excuse for you to go get it).

I am always on the lookout for ideas for a science project for Dylan. For me, the ideal kid’s science project has a hypothesis that

1. will almost certainly be wrong
2. can be tested empirically
3. can be proven mathematically

with extra credit if you can write a computer simulation of it. Dylan’s project last year was “What should you do if draw three cards to an inside straight in poker?”. He said you should raise. I usually beat him at poker

The meme travelling through blogs from Scott Adam’s to Andrew Sullivan’s this week is that the high cost of oil proves that the war in Iraq was not about oil.

The proof goes something like this

1. If we (the US) wanted cheaper oil
2. Invading Iraq was a bad way to go about it because
3. Oil prices are now higher
4. QED

That first step is a doozy. I don’t believe that the US invaded Iraq for any single reason and I certainly never believed that the US invaded Iraq to get cheaper oil. But, consider this.

Most people would probably agree that america’s foreign policy is closely tied up with its energy policy (as it should be) and most people would probably agree that both are closely related to america’s relationship with the middle east.

My theory is that the administration thought they could replace an unfriendly dictator with a friendly democracy thus increasing america’s influence in the region and improving america’s future access to the region’s oil. Doesn’t make it a war for oil - doesn’t make it not a war for oil either.

On one point, I do agree with Andrew though :

The high price of gas is the best thing to have happened to the U.S. in a very long time. It alone, given the paralysis of the government, will force a market-driven push into new energy technologies, deter SUVs, and provoke the kind of technological research which will benefit us in the future.

I find the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - the idea that thought is constrained by language - to be fascinating.

Here’s a variation on it from The Guardian

Take the Portuguese president of the European commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, for example. Barroso has an extraordinary knack: when he speaks English he not only talks but thinks like an Englishman; when he speaks French, he not only talks but thinks like a Frenchman. To hear him alternate from one to the other can be quite disconcerting, almost as if he’s switching between a left and right brain.