2nd Blog Post

Since my last blog post, I've been able to confirm multiple things about my project as well as finish my book. First, I'll talk about the book. Once again, my book is The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow. The book comes to a close with Mlodinow tying together all of the different types of probabilistic theory and data analysis into one greater meaning. He discusses how we may feel we are in control of a lot more in our lives than we really are. For example, Mlodinow asserts that one of the factors that contributes to success, especially financial success are chance encounters. These can happen completely randomly, and we have very little control over these matters. Randomness can also ruin our lives, as Mlodinow points out by telling a story about his mother, who was in the Holocaust. Mlodinow's mother witnessed the death of her sister in the Holocaust, which led her to believe that you can't plan for anything in life, and that we should not even try to plan, just go with the flow. Mlodinow disagrees with his mother, saying that maybe we don't have as much control as we would like, but we do have control, we can make choices that affect our lives, and that we would probably go insane if we truly believed that we don't control our own paths in life.
Throughout the entire book, Mlodinow teaches the reader, me, about different types of probabilistic theory and data analysis, while telling stories about certain famous mathematicians. However, Mlodinow is pointing out, whether he meant to or not, that education about the kinds of topics presented in his book are lacking here in the US. This inspired me to look deeper into how much of probability and data analysis we actually teach in school, which in my experience is, unless you specifically take electives that are geared toward those topics, is none. I also want to look into how that lack of understanding affects situations in the real world, because Mlodinow talks about real-world situations that involve incorrect applications of math, even in his personal life. My expository essay will probably deal with how a lack of understanding affects our lives, and how deep it actually goes. For example, I found a court case in which probabilistic theory was incorrectly used to convict a couple of theft. The case was later overturned, but that is still just awful.
As for my pieces, I will take Cammy's advice to try and write something like a day in the life of some person, and calculate some probabilities. I think that it is a great idea, and that it will be fun to come up with a bunch of different scenarios that I can apply math to. Also, I want to write a letter of some sort, maybe to the author, or maybe to a famous/influential STEM person. Third, I was thinking about writing some kind of story, illustrating what would happen if humans didn't understand probability. There would be quite a few funny things that could happen in that case. As for the fourth, I'm not sure, maybe a math collage?
Finally, the reason the book is called the Drunkard's Walk is because the way a person walks when drunk is extremely hard to predict, and is almost completely random.