Re: Which Twin has the Tony?
It seems your point is "probability only applies to future events; events that have already occurred (such as a girl getting a haircut) cannot have probability assigned to them." This is perhaps semantically true, but useless. My contention is that we can equally use probability to apply to events that have happened in the past but that we do not know the outcome of, and that this is just as valid as using probability on future events.
Case in point:
You have the A[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]K[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]. The board comes Q[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]J[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]2[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]. What is the probability your flush will hit?
We use probabilty in poker all the time. But the deck is already shuffled; if you have perfect information about the state of the deck, you *know* that the flush either will come (100%) or won't come (0%). The randomizing event has happened. But we don't know the outcome yet; it's hidden. Therefore we use probability to analyze the problem. I can say "the repeatable part of the experiment is flipping the cards over; I'm not going to reorganize the deck" all I want - the use of probability is still valid.
Clearly you disagree with this, but you aren't convincing me that your point is valid very easily.
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