Re: Every time ..., was Re: General formula

[Ben Laurie <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ed Gerck wrote:
> This also means that if you call someone and it is busy, you could call
> right afterwards (just add the round-trip total delay time -- say, 5 sec)
> and your sucess rate should be the same as if you would wait some
> minutes (as people normally do).
> 
> The reason in both cases is simple -- since phone statistics is given by
> a Poison distribution and you don't know when the conversation actually
> *started*, its end does not depend on the duration of your observation.

I don't believe this for a moment. To take an extreme example, if people
make, on average, 1 phone call a year, with a mean duration of 1 minute,
then it is intuitively obvious that if I wait a day after they are busy,
I have an almost 100% chance that they won't be busy, whereas 5 seconds
later the chances are noticably less than 100%. Of course, I believe the
second statement, but the first is not a consequence of it, IMNSHO.

You're just making this stuff up as you go along, aren't you?

Cheers,

Ben.

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