AS A PILOT SEES THE WORLD......

Every day next week will be the same backwards: 5/10/15 5/11/15 5/12/15 5/13/15 5/14/15 5/15/15 5/16/15 5/17/15

*snort*

My therapist just told me a joke.

So this girl walks up to another girl and says “Hey, have you heard of the Bechdel Test?”

And the other girl says, “Yeah, my boyfriend was telling me about it the other day!”

(photos by Bill Watterson and an octopus)

Survivorship Bias

I have posted about survivorship bias and how it affects your career choices: how a Hollywood actor giving the classic “follow your dreams and never give up” line is bad advice and is pure survivorship bias at work.

When I read up on the wikipedia page, I encountered an interesting story:

During WWII the US  Air Force wanted to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. The Center for Naval Analyses ran a research on where bombers tend to get hit with the explicit aim of enforcing the parts of the airframe that is most likely to receive incoming fire. This is what they came up with:

So, they said: the red dots are where bombers are most likely to be hit, so put some more armor on those parts to make the bombers more resilient. That looked like a logical conclusion, until Abraham Wald - a mathematician - started asking questions: 

- how did you obtain that data? - well, we looked at every bomber returning from a raid, marked the damages on the airframe on a sheet and collected the sheets from all allied air bases over months. What you see is the result of hundreds of those sheets. - and your conclusion? - well, the red dots are where the bombers were hit. So let’s enforce those parts because they are most exposed to enemy fire.  - no. the red dots are where a bomber can take a hit and return. The bombers that took a hit to the ailerons, the engines or the cockpit never made it home. That’s why they are absent in your data. The blank spots are exactly where you have to enforce the airframe, so those bombers can return.

This is survivorship bias. You only see a subset of the outcomes. The ones that made it far enough to be visible. Look out for absence of data. Sometimes they tell a story of their own.

BTW: You can see the result of this research today. This is the exact reason the A-10 has the pilot sitting in a titanium armor bathtub and has it’s engines placed high and shielded.

why would she sell sea shells by a sea shore when you can just pick them off of the ground for free that’s not how you run a business

I know it's a Hollywood thing, but seriously, Bilbo and the rest of them dwarves should have been bald after dealing with Smaug

I feel like part of the allure of reading challenging books, was because you didn't have to, and in many ways you weren't "supposed" to at that age.

IDK man, maybe, just.... pretend that those college books were made for someone a decade older than you, and all that awesome knowledge you're acquiring was stolen from the cup of societal norms.  

shoutout to 5th grade me for having a college reading level and apparently using up all future motivation for actual college age me to read what i’m supposed to. you 10 year old asshole