- Joined
- Jan 5, 2005
- Messages
- 8,325
[NOTE this is long. i don't think it is too ranty, per se... just kinda my take on like population statistics and their *potential* impact on the hobby =P
oh, and caveat emptor i spent the last 36.. no 38 hours trying to get a hang of programming 3D environments (and *ahem* testing some of the existing products in a possibly game-like setting) so i am a bit tired punch drunk (oh, and possibly slightly really drunk at this point hehehe) /NOTE]
well, it's not that i think any particular situation is going to turn out a specific way. that is far far beyond my abilities and i hope i am not representing myself as such. i think i do a pretty good job of disclaimering my stuff... though, if you skip too many of my "maybe" and "what about" clauses it could sound fairly like, predictive. i like to think that i am more *descriptive* of possible situations that maybe very well be low likelihood 3+ sigma (3 standard deviations is what... 67is...97.. 99.7 or 99.9 percent UNlikely...) but in sample size of thousands or millions still a concern that is not unreasonable to at least consider
see, the way i figure it is that in our hobby we have what i think of as 4, 5, and probably 6 and maaaybe 7 sigma events happening because of how many of us and our bugs there are
consider an event that is 1:10,000 likelihood of happening... that's pretty unlikely. something like that is probably on the order of winning ~$40,000-$200,000US2009 in a state lottery. that is not something i expect to happen to me or ANYBODY that i know personally ever in my lifetime. but... there are people on this board who have produced 10,000 babies of various things in a year! i probably wasn't far my peak year between all my individual and colony bugs. so that means, in a sense, one of the bugs i produced "won the lottery". now what if we are talking about some crazy bug occurance... a conjoined twin, say (a two tailed scorp or a two assed spider.... i figure those are around 4-5 sigma events, a ~1:10,000 chance)... if it is something benign like two-tails then it is just a neat statistical abstraction made concrete. if it is the likelihood of something horrendous (that also still is a concrete abstraction =P ) then i think it should make all of us at least pause and consider that it is likely that we do have 1:10,000 events sometimes cuz we have 10,000 bugs in a given timeframe.
and when you consider the whole hobby.. there are MILLIONS of births a year! in a certain sense, that allows for 6 or even 7 sigma events. those are... like... events of preposterous proportion. i think something like a... oh dang... those crazy er, bilateral hermaphrodites or whatever... half girl and half boy, like that crazy hench... person on Voltron. you figure something like that is in the neighborhood of 1:100,000 to 1:1,000,000. but you know what? i know of at least two ppl in hobby who have had them... and i freaking know one person who had a more of a 1/3 female 2/3male (both pedipalps were male) tarantula in real life! (p.s. that condition in various arthropods could conceivably be as low as ~1:10,000 i guess... that's not exactly my point, only my example). something like that takes soooo many babies produced and examined to turn up a number of example that probably fits on high school shop teacher's hand =P
and the whole sigma thing doesn't just apply to births.. it applies to EVERYTHING. the whole hobby is absolutely mind boggling in it's like, individual details! so that is the VERY condensed version of why it is silly to think that i could predict what is going to happen in a particular instance with 100% accuracy. i mean, no one can. it might not even exist as a possibility depending on who is right between chemists, physicist, particle physicists, and the q-crew.
i better stop typing before i bounce off the post length limiter... again =P
oh, and caveat emptor i spent the last 36.. no 38 hours trying to get a hang of programming 3D environments (and *ahem* testing some of the existing products in a possibly game-like setting) so i am a bit tired punch drunk (oh, and possibly slightly really drunk at this point hehehe) /NOTE]
well, it's not that i think any particular situation is going to turn out a specific way. that is far far beyond my abilities and i hope i am not representing myself as such. i think i do a pretty good job of disclaimering my stuff... though, if you skip too many of my "maybe" and "what about" clauses it could sound fairly like, predictive. i like to think that i am more *descriptive* of possible situations that maybe very well be low likelihood 3+ sigma (3 standard deviations is what... 67is...97.. 99.7 or 99.9 percent UNlikely...) but in sample size of thousands or millions still a concern that is not unreasonable to at least consider
see, the way i figure it is that in our hobby we have what i think of as 4, 5, and probably 6 and maaaybe 7 sigma events happening because of how many of us and our bugs there are
consider an event that is 1:10,000 likelihood of happening... that's pretty unlikely. something like that is probably on the order of winning ~$40,000-$200,000US2009 in a state lottery. that is not something i expect to happen to me or ANYBODY that i know personally ever in my lifetime. but... there are people on this board who have produced 10,000 babies of various things in a year! i probably wasn't far my peak year between all my individual and colony bugs. so that means, in a sense, one of the bugs i produced "won the lottery". now what if we are talking about some crazy bug occurance... a conjoined twin, say (a two tailed scorp or a two assed spider.... i figure those are around 4-5 sigma events, a ~1:10,000 chance)... if it is something benign like two-tails then it is just a neat statistical abstraction made concrete. if it is the likelihood of something horrendous (that also still is a concrete abstraction =P ) then i think it should make all of us at least pause and consider that it is likely that we do have 1:10,000 events sometimes cuz we have 10,000 bugs in a given timeframe.
and when you consider the whole hobby.. there are MILLIONS of births a year! in a certain sense, that allows for 6 or even 7 sigma events. those are... like... events of preposterous proportion. i think something like a... oh dang... those crazy er, bilateral hermaphrodites or whatever... half girl and half boy, like that crazy hench... person on Voltron. you figure something like that is in the neighborhood of 1:100,000 to 1:1,000,000. but you know what? i know of at least two ppl in hobby who have had them... and i freaking know one person who had a more of a 1/3 female 2/3male (both pedipalps were male) tarantula in real life! (p.s. that condition in various arthropods could conceivably be as low as ~1:10,000 i guess... that's not exactly my point, only my example). something like that takes soooo many babies produced and examined to turn up a number of example that probably fits on high school shop teacher's hand =P
and the whole sigma thing doesn't just apply to births.. it applies to EVERYTHING. the whole hobby is absolutely mind boggling in it's like, individual details! so that is the VERY condensed version of why it is silly to think that i could predict what is going to happen in a particular instance with 100% accuracy. i mean, no one can. it might not even exist as a possibility depending on who is right between chemists, physicist, particle physicists, and the q-crew.
i better stop typing before i bounce off the post length limiter... again =P
