Clarke's other two laws

I always hear about one of Arthur Clarke's three laws of prediction, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The other two are just as interesting, if not quite as pithy and memorable.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

A superior way to putt

A small but distinguished group of golfers and instructors argue that the best way to putt in golf is sidesaddle.

"It will probably take a Tour pro adopting it to make sidesaddle popular, but I have always said that it's absolutely the best way of putting," said Dan Pasquariello, a Golf Magazine Top 100 teacher at the Pebble Beach Golf Academy in California.

Dave Pelz, the research-driven putting guru, agrees. The best putter he has ever measured, including Tour pros, was a 10- to 12- handicap amateur who putted from the side. "He never, ever started a ball off line, and he was very good at distance control, too," Pelz said. The two primary advantages are the simple mechanics of the straight-back, straight-through pendulum stroke, and the use of binocular vision.

Seems convincing to me. Putting from the side has always reminded me of trying to play billiards standing to the side of the ball. It makes it artificially difficult to get the ball started on the right line, though opponents would argue that's precisely the point. Sam Snead putted croquet style at one point, but the USGA outlawed that method as they felt it made it too easy to putt.

Real life probability quiz

Mark Bowden adapted a piece of his upcoming book about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden for Vanity Fair. It's a crackling read.

What's most fascinating is the insight into how Obama finally made the decision to move on the compound in Abbottabad. As Obama has noted before, he only gets called on to make the tough decisions. The easy ones are made for him.

“One of the things you learn as president is you’re always dealing with probabilities,” he told me. “No issue comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. No issue comes to my desk where there’s 100 percent confidence that this is the right thing to do. Because if people were absolutely certain then it would have been decided by someone else. And that’s true in dealing with the economic crisis. That’s true in order to take a shot at a pirate. That’s true about most of the decisions I make during the course of the day. So I’m accustomed to people offering me probabilities. In this situation, what you started getting was probabilities that disguised uncertainty as opposed to actually providing you with more useful information.” The president had no trouble facing reality. If he acted on this, he was going to be taking a gamble.

As Nate Silver notes in The Signal and the Noise, one of the reasons more data doesn't always lead to better predictions is that people interpret the data subjectively. The intelligence on Abbottabad was weighted by each member of Obama's administration along with all the evidence they'd accumulated in each of their lives, and so everyone put different likelihoods on whether the man seen pacing in the garden of the compound (nicknamed The Pacer) was actually Bin Laden. The result, Bowden notes, was a distribution of confidence, with most at 80 percent confidence but some as low as 30 percent.

At one meeting, Obama asked Morell, who was seated in a chair against the wall behind him, under the presidential seal, for his own view. Morell put the probability that The Pacer was bin Laden at 60 percent.

Morell had been personally involved in the flawed analysis of Saddam’s weapons capability and yet had felt more certain about that than he felt about this. “People don’t have differences because they have different intel,” he said. “We are all looking at the same things. I think it depends more on your past experience.” He explained that counterterrorism analysts at work on al-Qaeda over the past five years had enjoyed a remarkable string of successes. They had been crushing the terror group inside Pakistan and systematically killing its top leadership. So they were very confident. Those who had been at work longer, like himself, had known failure. They knew the fragility of even the soundest-seeming intelligence analysis. The W.M.D. story had been a brutal lesson.

“Mr. President,” he said, “if we had a human source who had told us directly that bin Laden was living in that compound, I still wouldn’t be above 60 percent.” Morell said he had spent a lot of time on both questions, W.M.D. and Abbottabad. He had seen no fewer than 13 analytical drafts on the former and at least as many on the latter. “And I’m telling you, the case for W.M.D. wasn’t just stronger—it was much stronger.”

Emphasis in the excerpt above is mine. Examples like this make a good case for electing a President with a good handle on statistics.

Bowden's article does not shed any light on who Jessica Chastain plays in the upcoming movie Zero Dark Thirty. The second trailer for the movie and the priority of the advance billing seem to make her CIA analyst a central figure. These days, she really does seem like the busiest girl in show business.

4K

Sony has just listed an 4K TV on their site. it's 84", and it costs $24,999.99 (apparently that pricing trick of dropping a penny to rounding down one of the left-side figures matters even when you're talking about spending the price of a Prius on a television). This is the same list price as the one for their "consumer" 4K projector which is already on the market.

I'm excited for the future of 4K entertainment, but you are almost beyond an early adopter to jump on this bandwagon so soon. That's because for consumers there is almost no 4K content that you could even send to this display.

I say almost because there is one movie I'm aware of that's available for purchase in 4K resolution: TimeScapes. You can grab a quick preview of a 2560p clip from TimeScapes here (right click the link and hit save as; you really don't want to try to play it in your browser). You can purchase either a 25Gb 4K file of TimeScapes on a USB stick for $99.95 or a 330Gb 4K 12 bit Cineform file on a hard drive for $299.95. And then you'll need a 4K video card in your computer to even push that file to your new 4K TV to turn it into the world's largest, sharpest nature screensaver display.

Red announced a Red Ray device which is their delivery solution for 4K content files, but it has yet to receive a release date. They also announced their own 4K projector and have demoed it here and there, but again there's no official ship date yet.

Is this all absurd? I suppose. But who am I kidding? I can't wait to go 4K.

UPDATE: If you have just $20,000 burning a hole in your pocket instead of $25,000, then this LG 4K TV, also 84", may be more your speed. Given that both the Sony and LG are 84", they may be sharing the same source for the display.

Skill versus luck

I was debating someone over whether poker was a game of skill or luck. The same question is asked of many games or sports.

The best test for whether it's a game of skill or luck is one I heard of from Michael Mauboussin: if you can lose on purpose, it's a game of skill.

So poker, blackjack, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan...all games of skill. There is luck involved, of course, but skill plays a critical role. The lottery, roulette, slot machines...games of luck.

I first heard of Mauboussin when I was at Amazon as he owned a stake at Legg Mason. I saw a presentation, maybe he gave it in person, it's hard to remember now, and he described why he was bullish. Being an insider at a company, you can quickly tell which outsiders are smart and which aren't purely by how much they can deduce about your business that you haven't shared with them explicitly. People like Bill Gurley and Mauboussin were clearly a cut above.

Mauboussin's new book The Success Equation was just released. I haven't had more than a few minutes to skim the introduction, but it looks to be an informative read, with what I suspect will be some advice that overlaps with what I've been getting from Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, which I'm about a quarter of the way through. That is, we often overrate the predictive power of a single example because it comes with an appealing narrative or because we force fit it to support the narrative we want to see.