I've always known him as Wally, it looks like "Waldo" is an american thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where's_Wally
Here's Waldo
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: Here's Waldo
#22He's not at the edges of the page partially due to the print process. You need a large border of disposable material that can be cut from the edges (bleed) should the alignment of the pages be slightly out when the book is bound and trimmed. It wouldn't be much finding half of Wally, so they don't put him where he might be cut in two with a guillotine. (He's still better as Wally than Waldo.)
I think the margin of error for this kind of printing is usually only 3mm though, so they could still put him pretty close to the edge if they wanted to
3-5mm is standard, but if I remember this books rightly they're fairly cheaply bound (it's been a while since I've seen my copy of the one in that post, saddle stitched or stapled). Assuming a 5mm bleed, you can have at most 1cm cut in from the edge, which is substantial.
Re: Here's Waldo
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the margin of error for this kind of printing is usually only 3mm though, so they could still put him pretty close to the edge if they wanted to
3-5mm is standard, but if I remember this books rightly they're fairly cheaply bound (it's been a while since I've seen my copy of the one in that post, saddle stitched or stapled). Assuming a 5mm bleed, you can have at most 1cm cut in from the edge, which is substantial.
That's still not enough to account for the size of the region of bias though.
Re: Here's Waldo
#24Slightly off topic, but I've always wondered... Is there any particular reason why they changed his name for the US editions? Is there something about "Wally" that sounds weird to Americans?
I've always been told that it's dumbing down, usually the line is "American children wouldn't understand it". I suppose it's the same as the Harry Potter books, "Philosopher" changed to "Sorcerer" in the title. It's very prevalent to change "foreign" names to Americanised ones.
I'm not sure if that applies in this case... There's nothing to 'understand' about the name Wally or Waldo. They're both just random, invented names, AFAICT.
Re: Here's Waldo
#25This kind of spatial scan statistics is really easy to misuse without careful multiple-comparison corrections. Would they have reported a 52% effect? a 51% effect? What about 1.4 inch bands? or 1.2 inch bands? That "remarkably thin" 0.3 percent will disappear pretty quickly. Sorry that this is dismissive, but this piece is just a slightly more complicated case of http://xkcd.com/882/
It's not a statistical model for future predictions. The whole point here is to over-fit as much as possible, because you only care about a single dataset.
Re: Here's Waldo
#26I always liked the wizard best
Re: Here's Waldo
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always been told that it's dumbing down, usually the line is "American children wouldn't understand it". I suppose it's the same as the Harry Potter books, "Philosopher" changed to "Sorcerer" in the title. It's very prevalent to change "foreign" names to Americanised ones.
I'm not sure if that applies in this case... There's nothing to 'understand' about the name Wally or Waldo. They're both just random, invented names, AFAICT.
"Wally" would be a shortening of "Wallace", both are quite old names.
Re: Here's Waldo
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always been told that it's dumbing down, usually the line is "American children wouldn't understand it". I suppose it's the same as the Harry Potter books, "Philosopher" changed to "Sorcerer" in the title. It's very prevalent to change "foreign" names to Americanised ones.
Perhaps philosopher has a different connotation in UK English. Sorcerer just seems more appropriate in a book about magic.
The Philosofer's Stone[1] is a commonly used mythological item in fiction.
Re: Here's Waldo
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same, in theory, applies to sequences like 1 2 3 4 5 6 "because that will never happen", and numbers >31 (birth days). In practice though, the number of n jackpot winners is significantly less likely than 1... and do you really care if you only win $10M instead of $20M?
Except 1,2,3,4,5,6 is actually bought way more (by hundreds) than would be bought by random. It's best to use a source of random numbers. Any rules you construct just makes it more likely someone else is using the same constructions.
Exactly. Using a scheme to try to figure out a lottery number that other people won't choose is like using "ZZZZZZZZ" as a password, on the basis that anyone who tries to brute force it will try that one last.
Re: Here's Waldo
#30>Handford generally shies away from putting Waldo near the bottom or top of a page, which leads me to theorize that Waldo placement is largely a function of two factors: aversion from extremes and aversion from the middle.
Perhaps the methodology is flawed, but this is exactly what I would expect. Ask someone to pick a "random number" in a given range and their response is actually quite nonrandom.
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/05/is-17-the-... http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2009/12/17/the-psyc...
>When asked to pick a random number between 1 and 100, most people will choose a number that is odd, often prime, and approximately 1/3 or 2/3 of the way between the lower and upper limits. For some reason we think these values are "more random" than other numbers.
The prime concept doesn't apply here, but this is basically what we see with the two bars.
It wouldn't surprise me that Handford is reasoning, if even subconsciously, about where a reader might look. The extremes and middles seem like good starting points. Similarly, if we are trying to create a "random number" we tend to avoid numbers that seem like they could be derived from something else. Like starting in the beginning, middle, or end of a range. Or by multiplying other numbers together (which is why I think we pick primes).