Quote: Stylee TingTing @ November 5 2012, 12:38 AM GMTQI absolutely does my head in: Stephen Fry, glued to his notes and autocue, reliant on the research skills of undergraduates whose reach extends no further than Wikipedia. Sometimes I suspect that the researchers deliberately feed him the wrong info. Some of the answers he gives are not just wrong, they're 100% head-to-tail wrong:
1) The cause célèbre question;
2) What colour is an orange?
..and then, the latest "unique card-shuffling" demonstration: Stephen Fry, bless him, obviously has no knowledge of the laws of probability, as he averred that no sequence of 52 cards would be repeated until all the possible permutations had occurred and that his shuffle was "unique" and had never been done before. Any systémier or decent bookie would tell him that this is nonsense: a sequence, however improbable it might be, could repeat consecutively. The more a sequence continues without repeating itself, the likelihood of repetition increases correspondingly. When half the number of possible permutations has occurred without repetition, the probability of the next sequence being a repetition is 0.5, or 50-50. Once more than 50% of the number of possible permutations has occurred without repetition, the probability of subsequent repetition becomes more than 0.5 - more than 50%, or "odds-on" as a bookie would say, i.e. it would be more likely to repeat itself than not.. and this probability increases with each subsequent shuffle. This is basic probability.
..and how would he ever know if his own shuffle sequence had never occurred before? Who's been checking every single shuffle of a pack of cards since the 52 card pack was devised?
QI's sell-by date has long since passed by, in my opinion. Harry and Paul should do a spoof of it.
Spot on. Fry's got an intricate knowledge of a number of topics, and a bloody good memory to retain an awful lot of other nonsense. But little wisdom. You can know all the facts in the world, but unless you truly understand them, you're still a chump.
Quote: Freddy Sanger @ November 11 2012, 8:04 PM GMTI concur! :-)
With what? Are you intending to spam us? 'Cos it'll take me just one click to wipe your account clean.
