Archive for New York city
cement homeless
Posted in pictures, Travel with tags homeless, Isaac Cordal, New York city, Oxford, Oxford city council, sculpture, shelter, The Guardian, Unfinished People in NYC” on February 2, 2019 by xi'ancyclic riddle [not in NYC!]
Posted in Kids, R, Running, Travel with tags car accidents, e-bike, electric bike, FiveThirtyEight, game, mathematical puzzle, New York city, R, random walk, reckless driving, The Riddler on December 29, 2017 by xi'anIn the riddle of this week on fivethirtyeight, the question is to find the average number of rounds when playing the following game: P=6 players sitting in a circle each have B=3 coins and with probability 3⁻¹ they give one coin to their right or left side neighbour, or dump the coin to the centre. The game ends when all coins are in the centre. Coding this experiment in R is rather easy
situz=rep(B,P) r=1 while (max(situz)>0){ unz=runif(P) newz=situz-(situz>0) for (i in (1:P)[unz<1/3]) newz[i%%P+1]=newz[i%%P+1]+(situz[i]>0) for (i in (1:P)[unz>2/3]) newz[i-1+P*(i==1)]=newz[i-1+P*(i==1)]+(situz[i]>0) situz=newz r=r+1}
resulting in an average of 15.58, but I cannot figure out (quickly enough) an analytic approach to the problem. (The fit above is to a Gamma(â-1,ĝ) distribution.)
In a completely unrelated aparté (aside), I read earlier this week that New York City had prohibited the use of electric bikes. I was unsure of what this meant (prohibited on sidewalks? expressways? metro carriages?) so rechecked and found that electric bikes are simply not allowed for use anywhere in New York City. Because of the potential for “reckless driving”. The target is apparently the high number of delivery e-bikes, but this ban sounds so absurd that I cannot understand it passed. Especially when De Blasio has committed the city to the Paris climate agreement after Trump moronically dumped it… Banning the cars would sound much more in tune with this commitment! (A further aparté is that I strongly dislike e-bikes, running on nuclear power plants, especially when they pass me on sharp hills!, but they are clearly a lesser evil when compared with mopeds and cars.)
New York City Marathon snapshot
Posted in Running with tags 2017, Manuela Schar, marathon, New York city, New York City Marathon, Switzerland on November 5, 2017 by xi'anhold your breath for a few more hours…
Posted in pictures with tags Central Park, Charles Dickens, New York city, US elections 2016, USA, vote on November 8, 2016 by xi'an
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities