Recent content by OmneBonum

Living in Park City, Utah.

The OP's original question was 'Why doesn't the solution to the Monty Hall problem make sense?' The answer to that question isn't strictly mathematical. It has to do with the human brain, and how it evolved to do the kinds of things that it needs to do on a regular basis to ensure the...

Are you sure? The question uses the words 'pendulum' and 'swing.' Your visualization is more like, say, a wind up toy that automatically reverses when it hits a wall, the two walls being at -5 and 5 on an imaginary number line between them. In that scenario, given no knowledge of the amount...

Maybe it is just me, but I am having trouble visualizing the problem. The number line is straight, not a semi-circle, right? So the pendulum is stationary at -1? Then it is given some unknown amount of force? It can't then 'land on' any other number but -1, so do we mean something like...

Ray, sorry for the delay. I haven't had time to give your reply the attention it deserves yet, but I will. Apparently I misinterpreted what you were saying, it sounded to me like you were dismissing Bayesian reasoning and or conditional probabilities altogether! Which clearly, I now see, you...

Zzmanzz, congratulations, you got it! Sorry, Ray Vickson, but you are fantastically wrong. Please don't be one of those people who gets huffy and defensive when someone tells them they are wrong I can demonstrate why you are wrong, if you have the patience.I will be gentle. "By the way...

Right, so the site has a policy about giving answers to students doing homework, so if this isn't homework let me know and maybe I can say more. For now, Let us establish what Bayesian analysis does. First, we take the prior probability that something is true and multiply it by the...

Welcome, and oh how I envy you. I wish that were what I was doing right now!

Have you tried graphing it? I just used https://www.desmos.com/calculator. Not that I'm affiliated with the site but it's a good resource. To keep it simple I let both a and b = 1 and c=0. Then for the second line, plug in whatever value you wish for k. Remember that k becomes negative when...

Multiplying out the factors is completely unnecessary. You can get there that way but I would call it 'the long way round' rather than 'the right track.'

It is not actually necessary to do any factoring, but the right side is composed of two factors, and it might help to see them that way. I don't know if Fresh 42's approach would work, but it is way, way more complicated than what's called for here!

Ack! I posted an answer before but then I realized I was making things too complicated. We already know that p has a value. That means we have to kill off q. If it also had a value we wouldn't be able to solve for p, so we have advance warning that this can be done. So, look for a value of...

Great subject line! Welcome.

Welcome to the site. What kind of physics do you think you would be interested in?

Welcome! When I get writers' block I hit the square bracket [and just type whatever's on my mind, usually how much what I'm writing sucks and why can't I make it better, or that thing my girlfriend said, what did she mean?] Another trick, along similar lines, is to sit down and just write...