Last night there was one heck of a storm and rainfall. It practically shut the city down because of its effects on the subway system. As of 4pm this afternoon, it was still causing lots of problems and it hasn’t rained since early to mid-morning.
I just discovered that it was an F2 tornado. In Brooklyn. Wow.
Of course, I just “ankle” my way to work in NYC and was unaffected by last night’s storm.
-H
How long did you think that I would wait until I did a perfectly nerdy thing like post a bit about math or Shakespeare or encryption? I couldn’t resist any longer.
Over the weekend, I was trying to figure out the answer to an old problem of mine: how do I create a random normal distribution? The only statistics package I have is Excel and I was working on a little present value function and decided I really, really needed a random normal distribution. If you know Excel, you know that the “RAND()” function is pretty much okay (no snide remarks about it be a pseudo-random number generator, please), but it produces an equally distributed value between 0 and 1 that you can multiply by any factor to get a random number in a range of your choosing. However useful this might be for ordinary sampling, I simply couldn’t find a way to generate a normal distribution (you know, the old “bell curve” sort of thing). And for my not-to-be-disclosed-task, I needed a normal distribution of rates.
I’m sure many of you reading this has often said: OF COURSE! Finally, Famous Ankles will reveal how I can generate a normal distribution and I can sleep easy knowing I have it available. Of course, others will roll their eyes because this may be old hat to them.
One way of the other, here it is:
=NORMINV(MAX(0.001,MIN(1-0.001,ROUND(RAND(),4))),0,1)*$C$7 + $C$6
Where $C$7 is the standard deviation and $C$6 is the mean.
There are a few issues in there to tweak depending on your needs, but the “0.001” stuff is to make sure that the value in the parentheses remains between 0 and 1; but never equal to 0 or to 1. If it equals 0 or 1, it will return an error. In some cases, you might want to make it 0.000000001 or something, but that’s up to you. Also, the rounding is simply up to your discretion whether to include it or not.
So, plug it in, put a mean (AKA average) and a standard deviation into the appropriate spots and hit F9 until the cows come home! More advanced users might want to write a macro to generate thousands of them to test. I did and it sure looks normal to me.
UPDATE: I took a look at some other information after posting this and have learned that the “NORMINV” function can be used for a normal distribution creation if you use Windows XP, and even then it can be an iffy proposition. Well, I use XP and my needs are personal and definitely not industrial strength. If you have that need, you might want to re-think. For me, I’m pretty much fine with it.
-H
I’m getting a lot of viewer hits over the past couple of days. I’ve no idea where they’re coming from or even if they are all from the same person. However, it helped me decide it was time to upgrade the picture quality. My wonderful $20 camera was having worse problems everytime I took it out. You’ve probably noticed the poor quality, but the miserable thing wouldn’t let me take a picture from the shadows of anything in the light. I don’t know how many times I tried to take a picture of the Chrysler Building and just gotten a blur. Finally, a lot of pictures were just starting to vanish. I’d take five or ten pictures and the next time I’d try to take a picture, it’d say that it was “Photo #1”.
So, I’ve ordered a nice camera from Amazon and we’ll see how it works once it gets here (alas, no “free” overnight shipping on this thing). Hey, the last time I ordered from Amazon, the item never got here, so it may be a long wait.
I’ll give a better description of it and all once it gets here…and if I can manage to get it working properly. My concern is the same that had me get the $20 version: a “good” photo takes a lot of memory space. That means my blog’s memory allocation gets used up more quickly and that people who view my site may have a long wait for it to fully load. There are ways around it by using some specialized software, but it’s a pain. Nevertheless, it’s worth a try.
Yeah, I’m sort of enjoying writing the blog. I just haven’t figured out who’s looking in on it. Not a single “comment” yet. Wanna be first?
You know, a “real blogger” would have turned this into at least three separate posts: lots of hits from unknown sources, a new camera is on the way (not to mention the problems with the old one), and no comments yet. I’ve gotta get the hang of this.
-H
On my way to Church, I found the annual NYC half-marathon was in progress. Even if I hadn’t been aware of it before, I would have known something was up when I started seeing cops all over the place starting at Fifth Avenue and lots and lots of re-directed traffic. In fact, they had blocked off 7th Avenue for part of the half-marathon and then they had also blocked off part of 6th Avenue for a street fair. The runners were coming south on 7th and then were cutting east to pass Broadway, so no traffic on it at that part, and then going to 8th Avenue to go north again. And that’s on top of part of Lexington Avenue being cut off because of work being done at the steampipe explosion site.
So, out of roughly 16 north-south roads in Manhattan, at least at the level of 42nd Street, five were blocked to some degree. That’s extraordinary.
Anyway, here a couple of photos taken in Times Square.
I know a couple of people from work who were going to run in it today. I watched for about 20 minutes but didn’t see any of them.
Oh, Church had about 20 of us today. We’re practically bursting with people this summer.
By the time Church was over, the marathon runners had finished their run through Times Square and the street was open again.
-H
I had made absolutely no plans for my weekend wanderings this time. I woke up nice and early and contemplated the possibilities. That is, I opened up the subway map, looked at Brooklyn, and said “Hey, why not go to “Brighton Beach”?
All I knew about Brighton Beach is that it is a heavily Russian area near Coney Island. Oh, and that Neil Simon wrote “Brighton Beach Memoirs”, which I’ve never seen.
So, it was off to Brighton Beach. How’s that for intensive planning?
Using the oh-so-valuable subway map, I decided to take the “B” subway there. The “B” line is one of those subways that I never seem to use. It goes through Manhattan in some areas that I don’t tend to ride. For example, there are three or four main subway tracks that go north-south in Manhattan, each of them are host to one or more lines. The furthest west are the 1/2/3/N/Q/W/R/A/C/E lines: I can catch these on 42nd street at Times Square/Port Authority. The furthest east are the 4/5/6 lines which I can catch on 42nd Street at Grand Central. And then there’s the B/D/F/V lines that stop at Bryant Park on 42nd Street. It’s a pretty minor station that I’ve seldom gone in. And today, I went in again.
And screwed up…of course. I waited for the B train. And waited. And waited. I saw a couple of D trains go past (they go to Coney Island, but not to Brighton Beach). I finally got disgusted and caught the next D train to 34th Street figuring I could catch a Q train or a B train there. Once I got there, I discovered that the B train only runs weekdays at rush hour. I hadn’t bothered to read the big notices at the Bryant Park station.
So, I caught the Q train and went to Brighton. Here’s a thumbnail of what it looks like just after getting off the subway.
I think everyplace needs an elevated train track. It seems everytime I get off a subway with an elevated track, the place has just a little more character. And Brighton Beach has plenty of character.
It’s a very sort of “Brooklyn” place in a lot of ways. Lots of traffic: cars and pedestrians. There are a lot of families walking around. Except in this part of NYC, most of them seem to be headed to the beach. It’s only a couple of blocks from the station. Below is a photo I took as I walked up to the beach. See the elevated area? That’s the boardwalk.
It’s the same boardwalk that goes all the way to Coney Island and then some. I’ve always been amazed by it.
And now, looking westward (another thumbnail, sometimes the program lets me do thumbnails and other times it doesn’t).
In the distance, you can see Coney Island.
The beach itself is huge. Here’s a couple of pictures.
I wandered a bit on the boardwalk. It’s huge and just seems to go on forever. The temperature was in the high 80s and I don’t know why there weren’t more people at the beach.
I did wander back to what I think of as the main drag “Brighton Beach Ave.” As expected, the area is really, really, really Russian. While walking along I seemed to hear little other than Russian being spoken. Lots of Cyrillic lettering everywhere, which delights me for some reason. I just don’t understand why. Long, long ago, I memorized the Cyrillic alphabet just to test a computer program. (Actually, I wrote a tutorial on my old VIC-20 using a font program just to figure out how to use the font program.) I think I lost all knowledge of it after about a week, but I did have a good time with it. And Russians themselves are always somewhat fascinating to me. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Alexsander Solzhenitsyn’s writings, including the Gulag Archipelago, which took me years to read. On the world stage, they’re sort of like Texans. They are a bit grandiose and think they invented everything.
I went up and down the main drag for a while. I spotted a big grocery store and had to go in. As I entered, a 30-ish Black woman was coming out and she looked at me and quickly asked if I knew a nearby place to get some gefilte fish. I just smiled and said it was my first time in Brighton Beach. I was laughing to myself thinking about times like the Puerto Rican Day parade, the Columbus Day Parade, the Shiite Parade, Harlem, Williamsburg’s Hasidic community, and many others where I was never, ever mistaken for one of the locals/participants. Maybe I can pass as a Russian.
But, I’m a lousy Russian. At that grocery store, I looked around and could hardly recognize any of the food. Most of the signs were strictly Cyrillic and the place was a very Russian food sort of place. Some of it was a little intimidating and others I couldn’t figure out whether it vegetable or meat, or whether it was cooked or to be cooked.
As I was leaving, I noticed one guy at the front of the store buying some sort of pastry item. I figured that I had to try something very Russian. So, I looked at the display and thought maybe they were “blinis” or somesuch. The woman at the counter asked me what I wanted and I asked what they were. They were Russian pierogis (which I’ve had and sometimes enjoyed – see my Greenpoint posts). They sure looked different. They were huge and looked like large croissants more than anything else, although not crescent shaped. Some were stuffed with meat, some were stuffed with fruit, and some were stuffed with vegetables. I opted for the cabbage pierogi. The crust was very soft and sort of sweet, which made for a strange contrast with the cabbage; which was sort of pureed and mixed with some sort of cream sause. It was okay, but not worth going back for.
I did end up going to lunch at a Turkish restaurant, run by Russians, and it was pretty good. The service was horrendous, though.
And, I later did my sort of favorite thing: wander the backstreets. I found that within two blocks further away from beach, the area turned very Hispanic. And another block or two later, became a Pakistani enclave.
Here’s picture of the backstreet area.
And another, this one caught the subway as it was passing by.
I did notice one thing that was missing: Churches. Manhattan and Brooklyn are filled with houses of worship, but in Brighton Beach I saw one Synagogue and one Yeshiva (a religious school). Nothing else. That’s pretty odd.
Anyway, the trip was nice, but I have to admit that Brighton Beach is a long ways to go. It took me something like 75 minutes each way.
-H
Famous Ankles 