I left reality in a hurry

[austin_dern]

This is creepy. After talking about tracking Showcase Showdown outcomes on The Price Is Right I figured I had a few low-thought-required posts until such time as something breaks my compulsive streak. All fun so far. But then on the Tuesday (Saint Patrick's Day) Price Drew Carey paused at the start of the second Showdown to talk about the ordering of the contestants and offer his guess about which place in the spinning order probably conveyed an advantage. It was understandable when comments on a Conan O'Brien fan group were reflected on Conan's show: back in 1994 the Internet was a lo smaller with almost no comment threads dangling on every web page and there were very few places with a generally warm impression of Late Night then. It's insane to imagine Drew Carey, particularly given taping lead times, that he might be riffing on my comments. But there it was. Carey thought the first spinner might have an advantage; that show, the second and third spinners went to the Showcase (with respectively 55 and 90 cents).

So to my other Price tracking project. Long ago I'd told skylerbunny the Showcase is usually won by whoever's bid is revealed second, except that an overbid will be revealed second, and a one-dollar bid first. He had his doubts. I reason that it makes better suspense this way and typically reduces the amount of moving back and forth the host has to do.

I started tracking in January. Of its 19 shows, the contestant whose showcase's value was revealed first won 14 times, the second revealed won four times, and there was one double overbid. This superficially suggests I could not possibly have been more wrong. However: January was an abysmal month for bids, with 14 of the 38 contestants over-bidding on their showcases. Three of the four weeks there was only one day each that neither contestant overbid, and the other week only two days. If you remove those, and the lone one-dollar bid, then the first-revealed contestant won twice, and the second-revealed contestant four times.

Come February they found some contestants who could actually estimate prices: there were no double overbids, and of the forty bids total only nine overbids total. The first-revealed contestant won eleven times, and the second-revealed contestant nine. Taking out the overbids and the two one-dollar bids, the first-revealed won five times, the second-revealed six times. So the pattern is perhaps not as compelling as I'd thought. There were also three double showcase winners, and several nail-bitingly close revelations. I'm sure this will lead to irrelevant piles of data before long.

Trivia: On 19 March 1913 the City of New York, the Interborough Rapid Transit company, and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit company signed Contracts Numbers 3 and 4, with the city leasing the subways for 49 years and paying for part of construction charges and the whole cost of equipment (the contracts came to $60 million for the BRT, $77 million for the IRT, $152 million for the City) as several new subway and elevated train lines were added to the network. Source: 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York, Clifton Hood.

Currently Reading: The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale Of Battling The Smallpox Epidemic, Jennifer Lee Carrell. Once again I discover a field of ignorance I hadn't realized existed: so that's why it's ``smallpox'', and there is so a large pox. Why did I never ask that question of uncomfortable teachers in elementary school?

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Syphylis is the default Pox. IIRC, I do think I *was* told that in elementary school.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Or the great pox, when comparatives are so needed. If I heard it in elementary school the fact left no impression on me. It was also a smaller but still existent revelation to know that pox was one of those spelling condensations from `pocks', which makes a lot more sense now. English seems to have lost the collapsing of some letter groups into x's, and I'm not sure whether that's a shame. I do like the look of `connexion' or other slightly obsolete Britishisms.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Thus 'pockmarks', yes; I grasped that fairly early myself. but I did not know anything was ever billed as large pox, havigng only heard of cow- chicken- and small-. And 'The Pox' but that's like 'The Plague' in archaicness.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The book also makes mention of horse pox. Apparently there were poxes on pretty much everything you'd want to think about.