Christmas

I've always liked Christmas, but it's always been a little stressful. Less so now, but I'm scarred by memories. This is roughly what used to happen when I was a kid:

Wake up at about 6:00am. Not allowed to open presents because my parents like to be there when I do. See what I have been given by friends. Watch telly. Get bored, and make tea for parents. Sit around waiting for my dad to get ready. Hang about waiting. Eventually my dad comes dows. He still isn't interested in the presents, and seems unable to quite appreciate the mercenary consumerist tendencies of a small child. Meanwhile, much more energetic older brother is keen on playing, which tend to mean throwing things at me. Eventually we open the presents. The dinner is cooked amidst lots of yelling, and we know it is almost ready when there is a loud crash accompanied by lots of swearing. Then we eat, and since there is a lot of food, the rest of the day is a lot easier.

Boxing day is much the same except we have a lot more people since this seems to be the day we traditionally invite my aunt, uncle, and two cousins for dinner.

These days it's a little anticlimatic...

This christmas

I (really)^100 hate it when my browser crashes half way through writing an entry. Be nice if browsers could store entries in text boxes in case.

So, what happened? Ah yes.. Christmas.

Went home. Still haven't found a way out of London. Every time I mention this to people they seem to want to tell me the ideal route. It seems everyone knows how to get from anywhere to anywhere. I think there's a blokebook that I somehow missed out on. This contains detailed directions to get from anywhere to anywhere, and the offside rule.

I do have the chapter on how to open a tight fitting lid though.

Anyway, I got back, called my old friend, Peate, who is my sole point of contact with the crowd of people I more or less know in Brighton. Since he’s a Skoda obsessive, and drives a 180 Horsepower Skoda Octavia, someone bought him a Skoda Autosport beanie hat. Made in the Czech Republic as well. I wish my friends in Brighton had more consistently good taste. We met up in a trendy bar with horrible loud music where they couldn’t work out the cost of 2 cokes. Started off at £1.20, then £2.40, so I handed over 3 quid and got 80p change.

Christmas was nice. Very quiet as well. My sister in law was working on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, so she and my brother decided to spend Christmas day at home in Swindon. We seemed to manage to get to the present opening bit out of the way fairly early. Probably because an elderly neighbour was visiting, and we had to get up and ready reasonably early. I received many presents, many of which were toys, or shiny discs, so that was nice.

Also spent a lot of the time reading. Finished Three Men on the Brummel, which was not as good as Three Men on a Boat, but still enjoyable. Then read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. A book I highly recommend to.. ermm.. me, I guess. For those who are not familiar with it, it’s about Christopher, a 15 year old with Asperger’s who decides to investigate the murder of a neighbour’s dog. For some reason I found myself able to relate to the narrator, especially when he talked about how he always used to get very upset when his mother moved the furniture around. There are also several musings about maths and maps since Christopher is good with numbers.

It did spark of an argument between my dad and myself over the Monty Hall problem. The Monty Hall problem is as follows:

There is a quiz show. There are 3 doors. Behind one door is a prize of a car. Behind the others are goats. The contestant chooses a door. After he has chosen a door, the host opens up one of the other doors to reveal that there is a goat behind it. The contestant is then allowed to change his mind.

Is it worth the contestant changing his mind?

Intuitively this is obvious. Surely there’s no benefit to changing your mind. However, the intuitive answer is wrong. The probability of being correct when you choose a door is 1/3. The probability of it being one of the other 2 is therefore 2/3. When one of the other doors is opened, the probability you were right first time is still 1/3, so if you change your mind, you have a 2/3 chance of being right.

Here’s a more detailed explanation

Even though my dad is a maths teacher, and has a very good grasp of probability, I couldn’t convince him that I was right, even with the 100 doors example. He insisted that the probability changed once the host opened the door. He did come up with an interesting analogy though. If a bag contains 2 black balls and a white ball, the probability of pulling out a white ball is 1/3. If I pull out a ball, and then you pull out a ball, and it’s black, the probability that my ball is white is now 1/2. Perhaps I could have demonstrated with a pack of cards. He did write out a proof for me though. I’ll have to look at that.

First Monday after christmas, in order to prove that they have a complete lack of consistency in taste, a small group of us went to The Eagle (Down Gloucester Road, just round the corner from Kensington Gardens). The Eagle is a fine pub which does real ale, coffee, and home made food, and has its own bakery. I ordered a beef sandwich. I was served an extremely thick beef sandwich, where each slice of bread was about an inch thick, and the filling was fairly substantial as well. Everyone was shocked at the size of my sandwich. Peate said "Now watch as he demolishes that in under a minute". I'm starting to suspect that I'm getting a reputation for being a heavy eater.