Signals and Noise

I love to do experiments. As you know, I started experiments at a very young age--2--when I got to do some sinks versus floats experiments. Since that time, I've done lots of other experiments. Here is the most complex experiment I've done yet. It's called signal versus noise.

To do this experiment, you need poker chips in three different colors. I have red, white, and blue chips. You make two stacks of chips. One stack contains 2 blues, 1 red, and a variable number of white chips. The other contains 2 reds, 1 blue, and the same number of whites. The experimenter then decides which stack to put in the "urn" (my pumpkin basket) and which to hide in a nearby drawer. The other person, then draws chips from the urn, records their color on the data sheet, and then puts them back. After 5 draws, the goal is to guess whether the urn contains 2 reds or 2 blues.

When there are no white chips, it's not that hard to guess correctly. If more reds come up, you should guess red. If more blues come up, you should guess blue. Adding white chips makes things more interesting. The white chips are "noise"--you don't learn anything about the reds and the blues from the whites. After a bunch of trials, Daddy and I learned the following.

The more white chips there are in the urn, the more data you need to make a correct guess. We tried drawing 5, 7, 9, even up to 20 times and making guesses. It gets pretty hard when there are a lot of white chips. The more noise, the harder it is to guess correctly.

Now, for an even more surprising experimental finding. We tried the following comparison. 2 red, 1 blues and 6 whites versus 1 red, 2 blues, and 4 whites. Interestingly, when the number of whites is not the same in the two stacks, you can use the "noise" (the whites) to guess whether there are mostly reds or mostly blues. Amazingly, even without seeing any reds or blues, you can make a good guess. For instance, suppose you draw 7 whites and nothing else. We learned that this is a good indication that the urn contains mostly reds since there are more whites when there are more reds. Daddy says that this is because the whites are "correlated" with the reds.

This is maybe the coolest experiment ever!

A postcript: I've started thinking up and designing more of my own experiments. Yesterday's experiment asked the following question: Do you get more soap bubbles when you add the soap before adding the water or after. To conduct this experiment, I got two identical Dixie cups. In the first cup, I put in one squeeze of liquid soap, filled to the top with water, and observed the number of bubbles. I then filled the second cup to the same level and added one squirt of liquid soap after it was filled. I observed that the second cup had a lot fewer bubbles than the first.

Conclusion: Soap first produces more bubbles than soap added after.

Daddy was very impressed at the quality of this experimental design.

Metro Train Tour

Yesterday, the three family went out on a photo tour of the Metro. I had the idea that it would be neat to take pictures of the various stops for the Metro train as well as taking pictures of the trains, the stations, the turnstiles, the ticket selling machines, and so on. Armed with Daddy's camera, we went off on the tour. Click here to see the tour.

First stop, Dupont Circle. As you know, there's a really huge escalator in Dupont Circle. Amazingly, Nainnie went up and down this escalator a bunch of times when she came to visit us. Pictures 4-6 how the escalator. Picture 6 is a daredevil shot that Daddy took while sitting down on the escalator as we went down it.

Next, we came to the ticket vending machines. There are two types. The red ones only take cash while the blue ones take credit cards. Pictures 7 and 8 show these. I took picture 8 in a Daddy extreme photography pose. I more or less lay on my back in the Metro station (which Mommy thought was yucky) and shot up at the ticket machine.

Metro stations have lots of nifty turnstiles. Picture 9 shows me checking them out.

Next, we rode on the red line and transferred to the blue line at Metro center. Picture 10 shows the transfer point. Then we rode t L'Enfant plaza and switched again to the green line. This took us to Chinatown (picture 11). We roamed around Chinatown, but it was not as exciting as the Metro train. We went back into the Chinatown metro station. Picture 12 shows it. The rainbow thing in the back is a big lit-up Chinese fan piece of artwork.

We rode the red line back to Dupont Circle where we went up a different big escalator (pictures 13 and 14) before arriving at the top (picture 15). We stopped at the Dupont Circle fountain for a lollipop break (pictures 16 and 17) before heading home.

Sad postscript: We got home just in time to watch the Steelers lose a heartbreaker to the Falcons. Daddy and I were waving our "terrible socks" (really just my yellow socks) to try to help the Steelers.

Dali and the Ghost

I don't really like to follow the rules when it comes to making things. When coloring, I like to do it my own way--purple hair, pink clouds, and so on. Same thing when it comes to activity books. Sometimes I try to get the answers right, other times I try to get the answers wrong. A "perfect" score is when I can get them all wrong. Well, in this vein, Mommy and I were making Halloween decorations yesterday. One of the decorations we were making were ghosts. We have foam ghost bodies and sticky eyes, etc for other parts of the ghost. Mommy made ghosts with faces that looked like this:

* *
g

_____

where * = eye, g = nose, and _______ = mouth

My ghost face looked like this:

*
_______
*
g

I like my ghosts to be different.

Texas Hold 'Em

Daddy brought home some poker chips the other day after I spent the previous evening in rapt attention at this year's World Series of Poker. I give a lot of the gys on that show nicknames like handsome guy (the ultimate winner, Jamie Gold), sunglasses guy, fat guy, ugly shirt guy, yellow dog guy (Allen Cunningham, who always wears a yellow shirt with a white dog on it), and so on. One guy, Leif Force, who has very bad hair, was eliminated while I was watching. I was sort of happy about this since I decided I didn't like him.

In addition to the guys, I like to make predictions about which guy has the better hand. I now know that two aces is the best hand to start and that you should fold if you have a deuce-seven off suit.

Anyway, Daddy and I have now been playing full-blown Texas Hold 'Em at home. It's hard for me to remember all the combinations of the cards. And keeping track of the shared card in the center and how they relate to my "hole" cards is tough. But I love playing, and I especially love pushing my chips into the pot. One of my favorite things is going "all-in" and seeing if I win a big pot.

Planes, Trains, and Boats

We had a great day of transportation last Sunday. First, we went on the Metro train to the Mall area between the Washington Monument (which I learned is an obelisk) and the Capitol. While there, Daddy brought a bunch of sheets of paper, and we made some paper airplanes. We tried to figure out whether airplanes fly better when launched into the wind or away from it (into the wind is better) and to figure out which model of plane flies the best. It seemed to me that the origami box plane was the best design---followed by a plane called "The Master". After that, we walked to the tidal basin where we went on the paddle boats. I was a bit nervous about the paddle boats but soon came to appreciate their many advantages. It was a fun day to spend as a family.

Champagne Celebrations

This weekend, I saw the deciding fourth playoff game of the Yankees-Tigers series. Daddy has had several conversations with me instructing me never to root for the Yankees, so naturally, I was cheering hard for the Tigers that afternoon. When the Tigers finally managed to win, I got to witness a truly odd celebration. They taped cellophane all through the locker room and got out a bunch of champagne. While I recognized the champagne (it's the wine with the coolest type of cork), I didn't understand the need for cellophane. When Mommy and Daddy have wine, they don't cover the house in cellophane. Daddy explained that the wine was mostly not for drinking but rather for spraying on one another. Sure enough, the players ran and jumped into the locker room and proceeded with the sprayfest. Some of the players even wne back out to the stands and sprayed the people in the first couple of rows with champagne.

While I liked the idea of the players celebrating like this, I wasn't sure I would want to get squirted were I in the stands. First, I tried to gauge how far he spray might go. It seemed like it went in about four rows and not beyond. So if I were in the fifth row I'd be safe. But what if I had a REALLY good seat in the first couple of rows. Daddy explained that we could always move back in that circumstance before the players started squirting. I then thought that maybe if I wore a hat my hair wouldn't get wet from the champagne. I didn't mind the idea of my clothes getting wet, but definitely not my hair.

At the end, I decided that I'd really like to be in the stands for a champagne celebration. Especially one where the Oakland A's were celebrating.