Logic Games and Web Comics

I'm currently reading Superfreakonomics, the followup to the popular Freakonomics. I really enjoyed the last chapter I read, titled, "Unbelievable stories about apathy and altruism." There's a really interesting part about Economics games/experiments (click for the excerpt, though the book goes even deeper on several of the topics mentioned here). I participated in one such experiment when I was in undergrad, so it was really interesting to hear the theoretical logic behind it. These experiments altered theory and "conventional wisdom" about people's behavior in surprisingly concrete ways. The chapter then goes on to describe real-world and laboratory experiments that changed the new conventional wisdom yet again. I didn't see the later developments in my brief exposure to econ experiments, so it was even more interesting to hear about the changes that have happened since then.

Hearing about these quandaries reminds me of how much fun logic games can be. The book (not the above excerpt) describes "The Prisoners' Dilemma" (note the apostrophe, which I believe to be more correctly placed than the more-common "prisoner's" since there are two people making choices). The Prisoners' Dilemma, and some of its cultural impact, is shown here in comic form. There's also the deceptively tricky puzzle: "There are two doors, one to heaven and one to hell. In front of them are two identical guards, except one always lies and one always tells the truth. You have one question to ask one guard before you make your choice and live with the consequences." It took me a while to remember how to answer this puzzle, and I'll fully admit that I don't think I could have figured it out if I hadn't heard the answer in some long-distant conversation. But in reading about it I came across this even trickier variant. It looks intimidating to read, but I found the email conversation a very thoughtful way of walking a non-logician through the problem. But if you really want to stretch your brain, try this variant.

Speaking of that, I found a new webcomic I like called

Following are some of my favs:

• Today's. What a good day to discover this site! It's like a cautionary tale for me on my laziest of days.


• ...and speaking of cautionary tales, this is a cautionary tale from the past about me on April 14, 2009, at 11:50pm. (Thank God for Tessa, by the way.)


• ...and speaking of the past, try this with your friends from The Future!


• ...and speaking of the future, it's nice to know I'll be appreciated!


• ...and speaking of books I read last year/movies I saw last week, I'm pretty sure this one's straight out of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.


• ...and speaking of the unspeakable!

Buttersafe has been enthusiastically added to my RSS reader. When reading through some of the archives I was literally laughing out loud, which, by the way, I abbrev as "LLOL."