Talk:Wine/water paradox

Possible misunderstanding

One of the hazards of a problem like this is that "pure" mathematicians, including many probabilists, will misunderstand it and say, for example, that no well-posed math problem has been identified, which is true but misses the point. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:44, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

dt/t ?

If invariance under the mapping ${\textstyle t\mapsto 1/t}$ is desired (making the roles of water and wine identical), how about the measure dt/t?

$\int _{1/3}^{3}{\frac {dt}{t}}=\log 3-\log {\frac {1}{3}}=2\log 3,$

so

${\frac {dt}{t\log 3}}$

is a probability measure on Borel subsets of [1/3, 3]. And

${\begin{aligned}&{\frac {d}{du}}\Pr \left({\frac {1}{x}}\leq u\right)={\frac {d}{du}}\Pr \left(x\geq {\frac {1}{u}}\right)={\frac {d}{du}}\int _{1/u}^{3}{\frac {dt}{t\log 3}}\\[8pt]={}&-{\frac {1}{(1/u)\log 3}}\cdot {\frac {d}{du}}\,{\frac {1}{u}}={\frac {1}{u\log 3}},\end{aligned}}$

so x and 1/x are identically distributed. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:56, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be simpler to let y be uniformly distributed on [¼,¾] and take x = (1 - y)/y, so that 1/x = y/(1 - y)? Then the distribution of 1/x is the mirror image of x (substituting 1 - y for y turns 1 - y into y). Vaughan Pratt (talk) 05:35, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Wine-alcohol conflation

The parenthetical " (i.e. 25-75% alcohol)" would appear to assume that the wine is 200 proof, i.e. 100% alcohol by volume. Obviously we shouldn't solve this by calling it the alcohol/water paradox. Options I can think of would be to rephrase the parenthetical as "(i.e. 25-75% wine)", or simply delete it altogether. Any preferences? Vaughan Pratt (talk) 04:20, 20 March 2021 (UTC)