Mental Fart

The other day I was in a meeting and began to have some really deep thoughts on how random things are. My apologies, but this diatribe will certainly contain some ideas that I learned getting a degree in physics, but I'll keep it as light as I can.
So I'm looking at this ex-vet contractor who's trying to sell me on a HUGE investment and I start wondering about the caliber of his personality. I mean, is he a generally good guy trying to make a living or is he a cold, calibrating marketing machine determined to make me a notch in his belt. Either way, I don't care cause its his product I'm after, but judging his character keeps me entertained through the meeting. After all, the personality type is basically random. From here, my thoughts on randomness follow. Apologies that it rambles, but I thought it would be much too rude to begin outlining my thoughts while the contractor was talking.



First, I'm going to accept that things are random. There is a chance (x/set(x)) that everything happens at. Just like the roll of a die. Now, there are many different sets of chances going on all the time, everywhere. trying to track all is too hard and you have to come up with really abstract rules, so lets track 1. The one I'm tracking right now is my desire to invest based off meetings with vendors.

In statistics, you need to come up with a general model of your target population to determine its distribution...

Hmm, I'll go slower.

So I'm meeting with 1 vendor, out of a sea of vendors. Sometimes for a statistics model, you can say the sea is infinite, which makes the modeling easier, but that's not appropriate right now. There really aren't that many vendors in my market, so I have a finite number of vendors. Forget that we don't know how many.

Anyway, vendors have a couple of attributes that are desirable and various grades are available for those prices. Like how gum is cheap in a vending machine, but doesn't satisfy like the microwave pop-corn. Unlike a normal curve, a random sampling would show that there is a pyramid of contractors, with many shabbier outfits down at the bottom and the better at the top. There might be a belt of good firms in the middle or some other clumping, but in all, more at the bottom. I found a nice picture below
As I sat there, I could feel the bottom dropping out of my life. OH NO!! I'm going to be spending the rest of my life sitting in meetings so boring that I'm resorting to statistics to relieve my mind!!! Exclamation points all around!!! So the more vendors I talk to, the more likely I am to find bottom feeders. I sat there, stunned.

Then I though so more and realized, well when I find a good vendor, I can just use them over and over again. That made me feel much better. So how do I find a good vendor?

Well I can look some more. Here's me with some cool military looking glasses.
I could ask around. (I tried looking for a picture of this but only came up with porn)

Or I can steal other peoples contractors. Hmmmm. I should go back to the porn