friday-the-13th

by

Is it possible for there to be too many twos on a Tuesday (in month 2)?

It’s Tuesday the 3rd of February today.  It would have been better if Tuesday was the second of February, because then there would have been many numeral twos in today’s date to go along with the rhyming “tue” in the day’s name.

Actually, you know what, let me check something…

…nope, the 2nd of February in 2022 fell on a Wednesday, it seems.  Oh, but wait.  2-22-2022 did fall on a Tuesday!  I can’t believe I didn’t remember that fact, nor do I remember that day.  I’m slightly ashamed of myself for that.

Well, at least this month started on a Sunday, which means it will have a Friday the 13th.  That’s not going to be this Friday, of course‒that will be the 6th, which is inescapable when Tuesday is the 3rd‒but the next one.

Oh, and this is a non-leap-year February, and thus has only 28 days (which is exactly 4 weeks).  That means that March will also have a Friday the 13th, since it too will start on a Sunday.  That’s pretty much as good as it gets with respect to Friday the 13ths; this is the only situation (in our current date-reckoning system) in which we can get two months in a row with Fridays the 13th.  So, huzzah!

It doesn’t actually matter, of course; I attach no mystical significance, good or bad, to any particular kind of date (even a first date, which is something I haven’t experienced in at least a decade and a half).  I just think it’s amusing to celebrate and enjoy a date that is a prime number (my favorite prime number) and of which some people in the west have a bizarre superstitious fear.

Indeed, the fear of that date is so real but so absurd that there’s a whole quite silly and famous series of slasher movies which went by that name.

Thinking about the Friday the 13th movies makes me think about the peculiar stochasticity of creative franchises.  The first of those movies had as its villain (spoiler alert!!) the mother of Jason; she was killing camp counselors as a sort of displaced revenge against the counselors who had been having sex while her son (Jason) drowned* in Crystal Lake while swimming unsupervised.

One might think she would accept some responsibility, herself.  If she’d raised the stupid little fuck even half competently, he might have known not to swim in the lake unsupervised.

And where the hell was she anyway?  She worked for Camp Crystal Lake, supposedly.  When the “drowning” occurred, it was clearly not a regular camp session, or there would have been other kids around, at least.  And the counselors would be unlikely to be having sex in the middle of the day while a bunch of other kids were around.  I suppose it’s possible Jason snuck out at night, in which case:  he was the one most directly responsible, but his mother should have raised him better and should have been keeping an eye on him.

I’m taking this too seriously, I know.  But I do hate when people seek revenge on, or simply blame, a type of person rather than the actual specific person or people who did them wrong.  It’s not that I think that revenge is always a mistake; there are clearly evolutionary reasons why people are prone to take revenge against (perceived) wrongdoers.  Still, that tendency evolved in humans (or their ancestors) that lived in relatively small groups where everyone knew each other, so who did what was usually pretty clear and specific.

However, to hold some group of people to task who are merely similar in some way to someone who (from your point of view) did you wrong is not merely morally reprehensible, it is intellectually indefensible, and as a matter of character it is just pathetic.  It’s very much just another kind of bigotry, and all bigotry is a profound and contemptible intellectual and moral failure, no matter by whom and in which direction.

But I digress.  I was making a point about how franchises evolve from their starting points if they go on for very long (if I remember correctly).

By the second installment of the Friday the 13th movies, Jason‒the boy (?!) who supposedly drowned‒was somehow now the killer, and he wore a burlap sack mask.  Then in the 3rd movie (in 3D!) he took from one of his victims the hockey mask that became his trademark.  And so it went.

I suppose it’s not surprising that a franchise made by lots of different people over many different years should evolve over time.  But even when something creative is done entirely by one person, things can change in interesting ways that would not necessarily be predictable, certainly in their specifics, ahead of time (and it’s more or less by definition impossible to predict something after the fact).

I’ve mentioned this happening with comic strips, citing the examples of Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes, both of which showed striking differences as they matured from their initial, raw forms.  Likewise, the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett developed into much more sophisticated and interesting novels over time (though even the first ones were very good and very funny).

Of course, we’ve all seen this happen to long-running TV shows, some of which initially grow and become more complex only to “jump the shark”** in the end, others of which mature into things of real quality, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, after somewhat uneven beginnings.

And, speaking of things jumping the shark, I don’t even remember if I had a coherent idea for this blog post, but if I did, it’s gone now (and my blog overall has certainly morphed from its original form and intention).  So, given that, I’ll bring this post to a close before I embarrass myself even more than I usually do.

I hope you all have a good day, for whatever such hopes are worth.  I suspect they’re not really worth very much, but then, neither am I.

*Though he was somehow alive for the sequels and was a grown man with bizarre deformities.  But if he was alive, and had been alive (since he had supposedly been a boy when he “drowned” but was fully grown in the remaining movies), then why was his mother so pissed off?

**Literally, in at least one case.

by

Is an “almost” pair o’ dice just one die?

Oooooh, it’s Friday the 13th!  It’s so spooky!

Not really, of course.  It’s just a day.  I like Friday the 13ths, mostly just because so many people seem to imagine they are unlucky, though I think that superstition may be less prevalent now that it was in the past.  Nowadays, the day is probably mostly associated with the slasher film “series” that uses that title.  Not that even the original movie’s story ever had much to do with the day.  It just was a catchy, well-known “scary” day, following in the footsteps of Halloween (although the latter at least had a theme that suited the day).

Of course, a major reason I like this day is that the number 13 is a prime number, and I like prime numbers.  I like 13 especially, because 13 is possibly the most feared and reviled of the primes, associated with bad luck in much the way that 7 is associated with good luck.

Hmm.  I know at least part of 7’s appeal probably has to do with the dice game “craps”.  7 is the most common total to achieve when rolling two six-sided dice, because there are more ways to get that total than any other number.  Meanwhile, of course, there is no way to get a 13 on two (normally numbered) six-sided dice, but it is only just out of reach.  It’s the first number that’s too high for such a pair o’ dice*.

Of course, you can’t roll a 1 on two six-sided dice either, but that feels more trivial.

I honestly don’t think the reason for 13’s association with bad luck probably has anything to do with dice; it wouldn’t make too much sense.  But someone out there, please correct me if I’m wrong.

It’s interesting to think about probability regarding dice, not least because the very field of probability theory was first created by a guy who wanted to optimize his chances of winning at dice.  According to what I’ve read, he succeeded, at least temporarily.

Nowadays, of course, that field has grown into a special subset of mathematics and physics and information theory and so on, affecting everything from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to meteorology and quantum mechanics.  In a certain sense‒given that Schrodinger’s equation describes wave functions that have to be squared (in a complex conjugate way) to get literal probabilities that, based on Bell’s Theorem, cannot be further simplified, as far as we know‒probability may be something truly fundamental to the universe, not merely a tool for situations in which we don’t have access to information.  Based on Bell’s Theorem, which has been shown to apply in the Nobel Prize winning experiments of Aspect et al, it seems that, at root, as far as we can tell, the quantum mechanical operations are fundamentally indeterministic.

Of course, just because something is “random” at a lower level doesn’t imply that, at higher levels of organization, it can’t behave in ways that are very much deterministic in character.  Lots of little things behaving in a locally random manner can combine to create inevitable larger-scale behavior.  Perhaps the most straightforward and compelling such thing is the behavior of gases and the Ideal Gas Law***.  The motion of any given molecule of gas is unpredictable‒at the very least it is stochastic and has so many degrees of freedom as to be unpredictable in practice, but since quantum mechanics is involved in intermolecular collisions, it may truly be random in its specifics.

And yet, when oodles and oodles of molecules of a gas come together****, their collective behavior can be so utterly consistent‒with very little depending on even what kinds of molecules comprise the gas‒as to produce a highly accurate “law” with only 4 variables, one constant, and no exponents!

If that doesn’t seem remarkable to you, either you’re jaded because you’ve known it since secondary school or I haven’t explained it very well (or both, of course).

It’s interesting to think about the probabilities of dice games using more than two dice and/or dice with more or fewer than six sides.  Tabletop role-playing gamers will know that in addition to the 5 “perfect” Platonic solids*****, there are quite a few other symmetrical (but with sides not formed from “regular” polygons) solid shapes that can be turned into everything from ten-sided to thirty-sided dice.

But RPGs tend to involve rolling one die at a time, except when rolling up characters, at which time (in D and D and Gamma World, at least) one uses 3 six-sided dice (or 4 when applying a technique to yield better-than-average characters).

I wonder why there are no games of chance using more than 3 six-sided dice or using, say, multiple four-sided dice or eight- or twenty- or twelve-sided dice.  The probabilities would be more trouble to work out, but they would not be harder in principle.  If any of you out there either know of or want to invent a game of chance using more than 2 dice and/or other than six-sided dice, feel free to share below.

In the meantime, I’ll call this enough for today.  I am supposed to work tomorrow as far as I know, though that’s always subject to change.  If there’s no post here tomorrow, then it probably means I didn’t work.  I probably will work, though I couldn’t give you a rigorous working out of the mathematics involved in determining that particular probability.

Have a good day if you’re able.

*You can sometimes see them by the dashboard lights.

**Unless superdeterminism is correct.  However, this is a very hypothetical thing, and I’m not very familiar with what arguments are proposed to support it, so I won’t get into it.

***PV = nRT if memory serves. [Looks it up]  Yep, that’s right.  Four variables and one constant (R).

****Even if it’s not right now, over me.

*****These are, presumably, solids that really care about each other but in a non-romantic way.