Episode 293 - Twitter Rants: Jon Stewart, Scrum, and Just Plain Numbers
Max and Aaron have a little fun in a late night record, and examine Twitter rants about the rise of late night snark comedy, and scrum. They talk about the nature of corporate fads, and end on going down a rabbit hole of continued fractions.
Links
Related Episodes
Episode 207 - Max Returns with Priors
Episode 292 - Copyright Clashes, Literary Science, and Rational Distributions
Transcript
Max: You're listening to the Local Maximum episode 293.
Narration: Time to expand your perspective.
Welcome to the Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar. Welcome everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum today joined once again by Aaron. How you doing today Aaron?
Aaron: Doing well. Glad to be here.
Max: Very another late night recording not quite one in the morning, although it feels like one in the morning for me
Aaron: Scared me for a moment. I’ve got stuff to do after this.
Max: Yeah, time. Time does. Well, we'll move ahead quickly. Do you think we will ever achieve the dream of a 20 minute episode?
Aaron: I'm not holding my breath for it. Okay. Well,
Max: Today's theme of today's episode has a clear theme to it. It's, I would say the Twitter rant episode. So I've got two Twitter rants. And then I've got a probability distribution of the week which say it's like a Twitter rant.
Aaron: Are we still calling it Twitter and tweets?
Max: No, Well, we are but it's not called that anymore.
Aaron: It's gonna be like people, myself included, have not started calling it Meta. We're still calling it Facebook. Yes. It's always gonna be Twitter, in our hearts, right? Whether those are more well, dark, stony places?
Max: The difference is, it's still facebook.com. And it's still Facebook, the service for Twitter. It's still twitter.com. But it's not called the service anymore. It's called X. And so maybe at some point, if you go to twitter.com, it'll just forward to like x something x.co Or something like that.
So I don't think that hasn't happened yet. Once that happens regularly. And I'm not actually typing in Twitter to get the Twitter like look at our links are still Twitter. Yep. So I think at some point.
Aaron: It certainly seems like Musk has the vision of Twitter, or X, nay Twitter, becoming a company that does much more than just the the microblogging platform that was its original purpose, much in the way that Meta and Alphabet have many different silos, but none of them have renamed their flagship product as part of their corporate rebranding.
Max: So right, right. So first rant is about Jon Stewart, who we've talked about Jon Stewart and the Daily Show on this program before. I don't remember exactly when I want to look it up now.
Aaron: I feel like it was brought up by him starting his podcast.
Max: Yeah, yeah. Let's see. Let's see if I'm surprised we didn't do this during research. But, yes, okay, here it is. Episode 207 — Max Returns With Priors. And where is the information on Jon Stewart? Discussion of political comedy and with the return of Jon Stewart, right. Well, that podcast didn't really go anywhere. Did it?
Aaron: I mean, is it still around? I don't know that it's it's, it's had better staying power than Joe Biden's podcast. Yeah, but, but my impression is it's still around, but I don't think it's taking the world by storm.
Max: Interestingly, Episode 207 also has the first mention of rational distributions, which we're talking about later today. So isn't that isn't that a great tie in? All right, something about Jon Stewart and rational distributions. There's a connection there because when we talk about one we talk about the other. So let's listen to this Twitter rant.
This one is by Eoin Lenihan. Okay, let me actually read this guy's name. It is my slow computer. Dr. Eoin Lenihan. He writes, “Jon Stewart ruins a generation of truth hungry kids, those of us coming of age during 911 and war on Iraq. We're looking for anything outside of the MSN narrative spinning BS. He popularized mugging off camera, using pregnant pauses and mockery, to infer obvious stupidity instead of interrogating the facts engaging in informed rebuttal. The show is highly influential, but it left its viewers unable to discuss politics in a useful manner.”
“He is in no significant way responsible for the smug and moralistic tone of many on the left today. He's also partly responsible for the attitude among many of them, that anyone they disagree with is simply self evidently stupid. No facts required.”
“He specialized in mocking and caricaturing conservatives the trends we now see come to full fruition with the casual labeling as Nazi or white supremacist of anyone such people disagree with on even the most basic of social issues. That's his legacy and a time where a truth hungry generation were desperately looking for someone to cut through the partisan MSN mainstream media BS. He molded them into small be disingenuous and lazy thinkers.”
That's according to someone who apparently calls himself a doctor, but is an independent journalist. Okie dokie. All right. So, I mean, some of this is right. I think it's interesting, but I don't think it's entirely fair, because I think he's giving too much credit to Jon Stewart to the development of the culture. I think the culture selected Jon Stewart for that particular time. And actually, that longer article that you posted in the Atlantic kind of shows why Jon Stewart came along at the time he did, because you had kind of these. A lot of these like, faux partisan debates. Yeah.
Aaron: Just a correction. It's from The New Atlantis not The New Atlantic. At a glance, those look the same.
Max: Yes. Yeah. Maybe there is a, like, kind of a copycat syndrome there?
Aaron: There may in fact, be like, like okay, what was the company in in Boiler Room that wasn't JP Morgan, but, but sounded an awful lot like it anyway.
Max: All right, so. Yeah, so I think they say that Jon Stewart came along at the time, because they're kind of like all these fake debates on TV, not fake debates, but like, oh, there's gonna be one person that is a Democrat, another person's Republican, and they're gonna kind of like, say their thing each night. And he was trying to kind of break the mold there.
The sort of like, snarky situation that was popular at the time. I mean, I used to find that hilarious. Now, I kind of look back at some of it. It's not so much Jon Stewart stuff. But I'm thinking like some of the daily show like man on the street stuff, where it's like, we're gonna go in the street, make people look dumb. You know, the most extreme example for that is Borat, which, that's one of those things where I look back, I'm like, Oh, why did we do that?
Aaron: Yeah, and the the Daily Show certainly wasn't the inventor of that technique in that format. But you could say they brought it much more mainstream than it used to be. And you're so we have to keep in mind where the daily show aired, it was on Comedy Central. And that was much more something that would have been in line for, like, some of their prank show type content.
But this broke out of that market. People who wouldn't watch that kind of show, or, or maybe they would watch that, but they certainly wouldn't share clips of that with colleagues and family members, it would be the type of thing that maybe it would get shared around the college dorm. But this was going much further than this. It had much broader reach. And so he took that, and by maybe applying it to a different context, carried it a lot further.
Max: Right. I also think his early stuff, he tried to be genuinely even handed. And he was actually very funny. But what do we have today? Like, all of the copies of the copies are just incredibly partisan and better.
Aaron: And many of them Daily Show alumni. Yeah, I mean, yeah, much, much like SNL birthed many, many film franchises. Some which succeeded and some, which didn't. The Daily Show birthed a whole slew of news commentary slash comedy format shows, most of which I think, have not been terribly successful. I mean, the biggest success would have been Colbert and now his move on to The Late Show.
But that's he's kind of morphed into the opposite direction. And that's part of what the article about how Jon Stewart made Tucker Carlson was pointing at is that he was almost simultaneously poking fun at the taking-themselves-way-too-seriously news reporters who were ripe for parody as well as kind of the late night talk show hosts super chummy with their their their interview subjects format. Yeah, and I don't think much of what's grown out of that has succeeded.
Max: Yeah, it's almost like no, it's almost like okay, if as the it's not Atlantic I keep on- we should write down what the new Atlantis as they say if the news opinion TV was so bland at the time, we now have the same situation with comedy or political comedy today. So it almost seems right for someone to break out. Maybe someone should do a character based off the character like a character based off of oh, all of the Daily Show alumni. Just spitballing here, the character of the character. I think it can work.
Aaron: If you break the fourth wall too many times you run out of walls, I don't know. Oh, so two things, you mentioned that, that that caught my ear. So, one was that it wasn't so much that this was Jon Stewart's doing that he was just the man that the culture selected for this.
And that gets back to the whole great man theory of history or more of a how we and you know, fourth turning, secular, time marches on approach to history. And, and I think there's still very much an open debate on that. You know, what, when does the man matter? And when does the moment make the man? But that's an interesting way of couching this. I had a second thought and I've completely forgotten what it was.
Max:That's okay. That's okay.
Aaron: Oh, I remember. Yeah. So it was you said that when we were younger, perhaps back in our college days, Stewart, and The Daily Show were a little bit more even handed, that we thought they were funnier. And I'm curious how true that is, and how much that is nostalgia and rose colored glasses. I mean, I think there was always somewhat of a left of center lean.
My recollection is the same as yours, that, that he was much more willing or able to, to, to poke at both sides. And maybe part of that was a matter of who was in power during those eras. You know, during the Bush presidency, there were a lot of opportunities to take shots at, you know, compassionate conservatism and the neoconservative movement. There's a valid question to be made of whether he pulled his punches a little bit in the follow on administration.
But I'd be wary that we may be viewing the early days when we were younger and more naive, and maybe more aligned with those views as being less contentious and less biased, just because we were blind to it in the moment.
Max: Yeah, I mean, I, I don't think I was particularly aligned to his views. But I was like, Oh, I could enjoy it. And so it's hard to do that today. I've definitely seen some older clips recently. And they do hold up sometimes. But I'd have to do a little more research on that. I was actually I've been watching John Wilson's How To, I don't know, if you've seen that it's on HBO.
He basically, it almost looks, I mean, I know there's a lot of people involved in the production, but it almost looks like it's like one guy living in a dinky apartment in New York. But going around.
Aaron:It’s got a homemade feel to it.
Max: Yeah, going around filming garbage and trying to narrate a story while he kind of tries to tell us about a subject but he gets distracted and ends up in a completely different place. But one of the funny, one of the interesting things about that show is how he ends up interviewing a lot of people who are really nutty, like real, real kind of, nut case type people or people with like, really niche interests that you wouldn't expect. And you're kind of laughing a little bit, but he actually like, seems to treat them with a lot of respect.
And so it's sort of like the opposite of what you would get with something like like Borat or something in the 2000s, where it's like, we're going to take the man on the street and then humiliate them for our own entertainment purposes, which I now see as not a particularly nice thing to do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which, and then the people watching you're like, oh, all blah, blah, blah, are stupid. Everyone who thinks a little less stupid, but just like, No, that's actually not a very good argument.
Aaron: There's a sense that that certainly in the latter half of Stewart's tenure at The Daily Show, when he would invite people on for interviews either directly with him or much more. So, for the the correspondent segments was like, what did these people think like, how they must have realized that both given the format and the ability for these correspondents to cut the interview, however, they want, that they are going to be made to look an ass.
You have to be a special kind of delusional which which almost means that they deserve it, to think that you can, you can outshine and you know, go into a Daily Show A segment interview and come out with the view you wanted to, to, to, to project the message you wanted to send out actually getting through, rather than you being made to look a fool.
Max: Right. But I think a lot of people just didn't know what the Daily Show was. And you know, it'd be like people-
Aaron: Maybe early on, but especially with. So if we're looking at a situation of you know, senators or representatives, yeah. People who have staffers, staffers who are probably recent college grads, somebody on their staff should have told them hold up, man, this is a bad idea. Do not go in that room.
And nobody did, which I can't believe that they were that naive. But yeah, it would have been maybe I just have too high an opinion of our elected officials, which is something I did not anticipate saying going into this episode.
Max: It was a way to like be kind of it was a way to be kinda like socially like, Oh, this is the way to get someone and I yeah, I know. Looking at that.
Aaron: Yeah, why? People rag on on. Oh, god, what's your name? Sarah Palin. Much of it with good reason. But but I think she was the one that coined the term the or at least popularized the gotcha media.
Max: The gotcha lame stream media.
Aaron: And to an extent, that was very much playing that game. He may not have invented it again. But he perfected that art.
Max: All right. I don't have any. I don't have any resolution here. This is just a rant. So let's go on to the next one. Which is a rant about Scrum at work. Have you ever used Scrum, Aaron?
Aaron: So so not personally, I know that we use my company uses JIRA. And I believe that we do sprints and possibly Scrum. But I'm not technically on the software team so one degree separated from all that.
Max: So there are certain things I like about Agile, but like Scrum seems to be like when you take it way too far. And you have all these ceremonies and different things that you have to do every week. And it's it's basically like the corporate, the many corporate rules to keep things going. So let's read this. Let's read this rant. By Santiago. He teaches machine learning, okay.
He writes, “ Scrum is a cancer. I have been writing software for 25 years and nothing renders the software team useless like Scrum does. Some anecdotes: Number one, they tried to convince me that poker is a planning tool, not a game. Two: If you want to be more efficient, you must add process not remove it. They had us attending quote ceremonies, a fancy name for a buttload of meetings, stand ups, groomings, planning, retrospectives, and Scrum of Scrums.”
Oh god, I remember the Scrum of Scrum. This was by the way. This is wireless generation when I was there in the 2000s.
Aaron: They were big into Scrum?
Max: Yeah, they were doing like Agile Scrum, but they kept adding or they added all these things. And some was good. Some of it got like way over the top. Let's continue.
“We spent more time talking than doing. We prohibited laptops at meetings. We had to stand, we pass the ball around to keep everyone paying attention. We spent more time estimating story points than writing software. Story points measure complexity, not time, but we had to decide how many story points fit into a sprint in two weeks.”
I had to use t shirt sizes to estimate software. We measure how much it cost to deliver one story point and then wrote ‘contracts’ where clients paid for a package of 500 story points. Management lost it when they found that 500 story points in one project weren't the same value as 500 story points on another project.”
“We had many meetings to fix this. Imagine having a manager, a Scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously. We paid people who told us whether we were burning down points fast enough. Weren't story points about complexity instead of time? Nevermind.”
“I believe in Agile, but this ain't agile. We brought some professional Scrum change trainers. We paid people from our team to get certified. We tried Scrum this way and that other way we spent years doing it. The result was always the same. It didn't work.”
“ Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team. Scrum is not for developers. It's another tool for managers to feel like they are in control. But the best about Scrum are those who look at you in the eye and tell you if it doesn't work for you. You're doing it wrong. Scrum is anything that works for your team.”
Sure it is. Okay, so that's, that's quite a rant there. I love how I remember doing — and they did this at Yodel too — this was poker for estimation. Like you'll all sit with all the tasks, and everyone would have a bunch of cards for like how long they think the task would take. Or in this case, you weren't even allowed to say how long you think it takes you just assign it story points. And then everyone would throw out their cards at the same time.
And it was kind of like, yeah, it was fun. I don't even want to say it was fun. The first time it was fun. Maybe the first two times you throw out cards the first time. But after that, it was just like, what the heck am I doing?
Aaron: What's the mechanism there? So everyone throws out the cards, everyone's made a different estimate prediction on how long it's going to take to do this? Is it whoever voted the shortest amount of time they have to do it? Or take it average?
Max: That would be hilarious. It's like you're bidding on it? No no no.
Aaron: What is that mechanism called where and you see it a lot in like insurance and bidding that to know that you're kind of spot on with your estimates, you don't want to when you want to be consistently be coming in second, because you figure whoever bid, the lowest is under bidding, and you don't want to bid so high that you never get it.
But if you're always in second place, then you're pretty damn accurate. Now it means you don't get the business. But in terms of reliability of your-
Max: It’s the average. Yeah, I think. Yeah, so I think what would happen is, if there was a difference of opinion, then you would have to talk and reconcile it. So like, you'd always be like, “Oh, if I throw out like a card, that's like a lot harder,” they'd be like, “Oh, you think this takes more work? Why do you think that?” And then you'd have to answer for yourself. So that was not very, not very pleasant.
Aaron: So I've never had to do estimating in a formal context, like that is always my least favorite part of any project is, even if I have a very clearly laid out plan of steps A through Z of how we're going to accomplish this, and what what's dependent on what what needs to be done, and then they come and say, “Okay, so how long do you need to do it?” like “Well, hell, if I know?I've never done it before?”
Max: Yeah, yeah. You know, there is kind of an estimation process, but a lot of these ceremonies just go way over the top. And I think that poker is one of them. I think the standup, the fact that they had to pass around the ball that gets old, real fast. You know what the best-
Aaron: I’m surprised they don’t require them to have a conch shell.
Max: Yeah. The best stand ups I've been at is your morning stand ups, and it's like four people, and you just round up with four, but you don't have to pass around the ball with four people. Now, when they let that expand, like at some places, that's why I'm looking at you Foursquare to like 15 people, it gets to be kind of like, “Why are we standing around listening to 15 people? I can't like, listen and help every single person. When it’s four people, you kind of everybody can respond to everybody else.
Aaron: That gets to a whole other subject of what are optimal team sizes. I have opinions on that. We recently went through a corporate reorg at work. And it's mean that that certain people that were on certain teams are now reshuffled, and it's it's meant that a bunch of our meetings we've basically deep sixed because now that there are people on three different teams from that were in the meeting before if we invite all three of those teams and all those people now we've got twenty people in a meeting that used to be five, and we're going to spend the whole time just telling each other what we're up to and not actually accomplish anything.
So I could just as easily see it going in the opposite direction, though with that kind of thing. Well, it's okay, well, that now we need to have all twenty people in and so it's going to take us instead of sixty minutes could take us three hours and we're still not going to be any better off.
Max: Right, right. I guess. I'm looking at the funny ones, Scrum of Scrums where it's like there always does have to be some meet like if there's an update in these meetings. There always has to be some meta update for the company overall. But I don't you know, I don't know if Scrum of Scrums is
Aaron: That sounds like a problem for middle managers and not for me.
Max: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I don't know what the this the Scrum of Scrums is, unless that's like a weekly Scrum that's like the bigger, that’s Sprint planning meeting. Anyway. Well, actually, one thing that I did like at Wireless was on a team we'd have like these monthly retrospective meetings where we talk about what went well, what didn't go well.
And so long as there was a good facilitator on that. I felt like that was kind of helpful. So every once in a while there's something that you could do that's helpful, like a “ceremony” but it's just like, don't do any of the hokey stuff. Just like be cool. Okay, that's, that's my take on it.
Aaron: I will call out. So where is it here was number three, we were prohibited laptops in meetings. So not always a good thing. But I've seen a couple of things recently about how Amazon doesn't allow PowerPoints, and they have a very specific, memo based culture.
And I can see perhaps some benefits to that kind of approach. Mostly because I've seen death by PowerPoint done in so many, so painful ways. But I could see how, particularly if you use tools like a JIRA or something like that, not having it in your Scrum meeting could kind of be counterproductive.
Max: I feel like Scrum trainers was like the DEI professional of the 2000s.
Aaron: Now, have you ever had to deal with Six Sigma?
Max: No, what's what's that?
Aaron: So that may have been kind of the generation before Scrum. But it was about your process optimizing. And I don't know if GE originated it, but GE was big into Six Sigma. It got lampooned slightly on 30 Rock, when when Jack Donaghy came into the picture there but same thing in that, at some companies, it was like, well, you must within your first two years, get Six Sigma certified, and you're gonna get your green belt, and then you get your black belt and you're going to do a project.
I remember hearing stories from people I've worked with that at prior companies that they had a, they had a Six Sigma project, which involved them moving to a new tool, and then they had a follow up Six Sigma project, which involved the moving away from that tool, because it broke. They proved that there was value in doing it. And then they proved that actually, there's even more value in not doing it.
Max: Okay, I do not follow this Aaron, Six Sigma sounds very complicated.
Aaron: I have mixed feelings about it. Yeah.
Max: So I was actually talking to an engineer friend the other day about software engineering in the 2000s, about how we used to use Java and Java did not have certain features. And there were all these crazy frameworks that you had to work around like Spring, there was like the Spring framework, and it was like, Oh, you better learn the Spring framework. You want to put it on your resume. And it's like, nobody cares about that stuff anymore.
Which is good, because I always I never I never liked that stuff. So yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what else to say about this other than sometimes you need a process. But don't go overboard. You know, life is about the golden mean.
Aaron: You said you have positive experiences with Sprints, and sure other pieces of Agile. So, if you're stuck in a world of Scrum, don't abandon all processes, but maybe there's a middle way.
Max: Right. That's what I think unless, unless there are some people out there who think that there needs to be who have very strong opinions about how this stuff would work. I'd like to hear it. localmaxradio@gmail.com if you'd like to weigh in or weigh in on our locals maximum.local.com. Aaron, anything else on Scrum? Oh, wait one more thing before we start? I think there was a clip in the HBO show Silicon Valley where they lampooned Scrum or they parodied Scrum.
Aaron: I’m sure there was.
Max: Yeah, and but then I remember there was like a debate underneath it. Well, what they're showing is not Scrum. So yeah, I mean, like, once you get into the religious wars of like, this is Scrum, this is not Scrum. It's just like, get me out of this meeting.
Aaron: No true Scrum Man…
Max: I do prefer Scrum to DEI, I’ll say that. Just pick your pick your torture. Alright. Anything else before we move on?
Aaron: No, that's all I got.
Max: All right, great. Stop doing Scrum meme? Should there be is there one or no?
Aaron:I haven't been able to find it.
Max: All right. So now we've got a segment.
Narration: And now, the probability distribution of the week.
Max: All right, folks, it is the probability distribution of the week in keeping with last episode, 292. And, of course, Episode 207 from last year, or a couple of years ago, we're going to be talking about probability distributions that you can build over the rational numbers.
You know, those are numbers that can be expressed as the ratio between two numbers like one half seven thirds, all that good stuff. So these are theoretical, because most of the probability distributions that we deal with in statistics are either like continuous distribution, like on the real numbers, like the normal distribution, the curve, or it's just like a discrete distribution like a rolling of the dice or the Poisson distribution that we went over and all that.
All right, so one of the things that I think could be used is so so these are theoretical, but I'd like to think about the practical applications that they might have. One of the other things that I think might be able to be used if we were to make a good distribution over the rational numbers, is continued fractions.
Now, a continued fraction is like a Twitter rant of natural numbers. Each rational number can be made into like a canonical continued fraction. A continued fraction is like a plus one over B plus one over c plus one over d plus one over the cetera, et cetera. And so it ends at some point. And so eventually, it terminates.
How does it work? Well, the idea is like, the first number that you pull out in any fraction is like, the whole number of parts. So you make the fraction, like if it's four and three quarters, like the first number would be four plus, and then okay, then three quarters, it's like, well, then how do you make three quarters into something? Well, it's four plus one over four thirds, you just flip it around. Follow me so far?
So when it's four plus three quarters, the fraction part is going to be between zero and one. But when you do one over that, one over four thirds, the piece on the bottom is then going to be greater than one. So now you could pull it apart again. And then and then keep going. And by doing this, every single rational number has a unique continued fraction, there's some way to repeat a number, but there's like a canonical continued fraction for each rational number.
And it's it's not based on like, base 10, or anything. So it's like, a very natural way to, to create, to kind of organize for fractions. So, and eventually, this terminates at the end. So it's like it, like it might be a plus one over b. And then that's it. You know, so four and a fourth is a very simple one.
But yeah, so this is some kind of like, finite string of, of numbers. So I think this means that each rational number can be encoded as a sequence of natural numbers. So for example, like, let's take the encoding 123. Okay.
So it would be one plus one over two plus one over three. So two, plus one over three is two and a third, you'll take one over that one plus that it ends up coming out to 10. Seven. So this is a very hard one to do in audio format. So hopefully, hopefully, you could tell me if there's any questions along the way. But I would say don't worry about actually understanding it fully in your head, but I'd encourage you to look it up.
Alright, so how can this be used to make a probability distribution? I think you take two distributions over the natural numbers, one for the size of the continued fraction, and the other for the distribution over the value of the number for each number, and then you could get that you'd get that distribution? And I think that'd be one way to do it. And I don't know what the property is, that would be but I think that would be interesting.
But another thing that's interesting about that is there's a deep connection between continued fractions and the Fibonacci sequence. So and the golden ratio. So how familiar are you with these things? And I would venture to say they cover this at MIT.
Aaron: Yes, I'm familiar with the Fibonacci sequence. And I've certainly heard of the golden ratio, I had to look it up but the symbol for it is indeed phi. But I just did that off the top of my head.
Max: Yeah, yeah. So Fibonacci sequence, for those of you who have forgot, is every number is the sum of the previous two numbers. So it starts with one one, and then it goes to two. And then two plus one is three, two plus three is eight, five plus eight is thirteen, etc, etc. So you also want to look at like successive ratios of these. So you know, a ratio of consecutive Fibonacci numbers, it'd be like three halves, five thirds, eight fifths, thirteen-eighths, et cetera, et cetera. And so those approach the golden mean, their golden Golden Ratio, like 1.6 or something like that. I mean, if you do the opposite, one if you do like two thirds, three fifths, five eighths, then it's the point six something something something it's an irrational number.
But those ratios approach these things. So it turns out that those ratios of consecutive Fibonacci sequences always have the same type of continued fraction, it's always in the form 1111111. And then ends with a two. Now, you can end with a one in a continued fraction, because if you end with a one, you're simply adding one to the number right next to it. So you might as well just put them together. So it's 11111112.
And then, if you want to talk about an infinite continued fraction, the infinite continued fraction, that's 11111 repeating forever, is the golden ratio. So that seems like it has a pretty special place in the world of continued fractions if that makes sense.
So I, I think, I think this is fascinating, by the way, another interesting thing like, well, why is this? Why is this 1111111? What does that have to do with Fibonacci? And so you could kind of see it, in a certain sense, like, let's say you have five eighths, right? Five, eight, those are two Fibonacci numbers, okay, five divided by eight, then what happens when you add one to it?
Well, it's one plus five eighths, and then the one becomes eight over eight. And then when you add that the numerator becomes five plus eight. So now you have 13, over eight. So you literally just did the Fibonacci jump, right there using arithmetic, which, that's pretty cool. And then, and then you take one over that, and you get it back into the original formula.
So I think you teach this to middle school kids, high school kids, and it's really interesting, kind of, kind of mathematical explanation. So I think there's a world where we can make these types of Fibonacci sequences more likely, as a prior, as a distribution over the rational numbers. I think there's something here, I'm not really sure.
But what's interesting is there is something called a periodic continued fraction, which is a continued fraction where, like a certain number or sequence of numbers repeats infinitely. And so that's what the golden ratio has, it's an infinite repetition of ones. And you could think of any rational number ending with an infinite repetition of zeros.
And it turns out that every number that can be expressed in this form is actually is actually a quadratic number. So that means like, it's, it's irrational, but it could have a square root or something like that. So maybe one repeated would be something that would be very likely in this system, because you could have some system where you're some probability distribution, where you're like you have two finite sequences of numbers, the stuff at the beginning that's not repeated, and the stuff at the end that is repeated. And then each of those would have probability distributions on them.
And so if the stuff at the beginning is empty, that's going to be a pretty likely one, right? Because you have a certain probability of ending. And then if the repeated one is just the digit one that repeats over and over again, that's short. So by what's that law, Occam’s Razor, that's going to be a very likely one. And so that would make the golden ratio very likely.
So it would put certain quadratic numbers in a higher plane than others. And that could be a really interesting way to like categorize the, you know, the likelihood of numbers or the interestingness of numbers, I think there is something, some really cool mathematical explanations that could be done here.
Aaron: Interesting.
Max: All right. That's all that's all I have to say about it. Any any questions for the class?
Aaron: I haven't fully grasped this one. So I'm gonna have to think on a little.
Max: Alright. Okay, well, you got questions, go on the locals maximum.locals.com or email us localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week, everyone.
That's the show. To support the Local Maximum, sign up for exclusive content and their online community at maximum about locals.com. A Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up. Remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also, check out the website with shownotes and additional materials at local max radio.com. If you want to contact me the host, send an email to local max radio@gmail.com and have a great week.