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
Just in case it isn’t clear: I put up the pictures in two fashions: (1) I can embed the picture into the post; and (2) I can put in a “thumbnail” picture. Those are much smaller and you need to click on them to get the full picture. Of course, with my $20 camera a “full picture” may not be much more clear than a thumbnail.
[UPDATE: I’ve got a new camera and I’ve solved the sizing issue. You can still click on pictures to make the bigger, sometimes a lot bigger. This post is, therefore, moot. But, I like the picture in it and don’t wanna remove it.]
Just for the sake of putting in a picture, here’s a picture taken in May 1955 of my Dad, Mom, and Mark (Famous Ankles’ big bro).
I originally wanted to do this as a thumbnail, but the upload process only offered me the options of “Full Size” and “Title”. The agony of blogdom… [Update: ….isn’t around this topic anymore.]
-H
This is an inside joke from one of my previous “adventures” in Manhattan. One thing that I’ve found out about myself is that I pretty much enjoy parades. Not so much for the parades, but for what happens in them and the general aura of people-watching that it brings out in me.
On April 22, 2007, I went to the Greek Independence Day Parade held on Fifth Avenue and found myself standing next to two incredibly cute twin girls about 4 or 5 years old. They were dressed in traditional Greek outfits and their parents had them sitting on the curb. The parents, apparently Greek in origin, taught the girls to cry out “Zito Elada”, which apparently is the phrase-of-the-day for that parade. At first, the girls were a little quiet but, after encouragement from their parents, discovered that yelling out “Zito Elada” brought them lots of attention and they liked it. The attention was such that people in the parade, including official-type photographers, were snapping these girls’ pics constantly. In later comments to others, I joked that my ankles had earned celebrity points throughout all of Greece.
Once I started thinking about doing a blog, I considered naming it something like “wanderingNYC” or “NYCwanderer”, but they just didn’t seem to have the cache of “famous ankles”.
-H
Famous Ankles 