Do you find that you’re losing your mind?
Yes, a bit.
Katy, while talking to her friend Pam, regarding spending all day with a small child and the intricacies of baby-talk
We need heeeeeeeeeeelp!
I have come to the conclusion that Katy and I are addicted to FarmVille. This is not good :) Katy and I have decided to set up a FV moratorium for the coming week.
This one’s for Katy
God, I feel old
I was having a chat with the new PhD student at work today and ended up reminiscing about the arcana of US Robotic S-Registries, why QEMM-386 was an evil, evil piece of software and why the assembly demo scene was inherently cool and elegant. He hadn’t heard about any of this. Don’t get me wrong. Having seemingly unlimited amounts of computing power and resources is a good thing. Being able to download HD video at gigabit speeds is a very good thing. There is a feeling of rose-tinted nostalgia about being in my parents’ basement trying to get my very first PC to boot windows 3.1 with enough base RAM available to start Wolfenstein or to get my modem init string to the point where I could squeeze out those last few bauds to download porn that little much quicker :)
Life was more frustrating, if simpler, back then :)
Quote of the day
This quote comes from a CV submitted for a rather high-ranking position. It features prominently at the top of the first page, generally where people put the really high-impact, important stuff:
– In-depth ability to walk over rough, uneven, or rocky surfaces.
This, of course, is essential for a desk job.
What I want for xmas
(don’t laugh – I know it’s early and I know I ranted about it earlier, but I was asked about it a few times already)
I would like, in no particular order:
– A multi-region DVD player with HDMI connections that can do 1080p upscaling with divX playback
possibly: http://www.mrmdvd.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1045
– Star Trek DVD
– FurTV DVD Box Set
– The Boat that Rocked DVD
– a smoke box and rib rack for the BBQ
– new frying pans
– more Robert Welch kitchen knives
Euromillions follow-up
As a follow-up to this post, I found out why the same numbers were always coming up. It has to do with the sorting of the numbers and the distribution it produces.
(right-click and save image to view it at full resolution)
In a nutshell, if you simulate 1,000,000 lottery tickets and plot the frequency of the sorted numbers at each position, you get the graph as above. Increasing the number of simulated draws just improves the normality of the distribution at each position.
Not rocket science, but still a pretty picture :)
Christmas displays should not be legally allowed to be put up in September
Having Halloween displays in September? Early, but acceptable.
Having xmas displays at the same time???
Don’t get me wrong, I love xmas. I really, really do. But it really gets my goat when the displays start creeping in earlier and earlier every year. September??? I mean, come on!
Random dialogue of the day
I just passed a coworker in the corridor. The following conversation is verbatim:
CW: Hello
Me: Hello
CW: It could be worse.
Buh?
Any number theorists out there?
Based on Derren Brown’s magical formula to win on the lottery, I hacked together a little bit of code to try and win the upcoming EuroMillion draw (yes, I know I’m sad).
The code generates random tickets with 5 unique numbers between 1 and 50 and 2 potentially non-unique numbers between 1 and 9. For example:
Ticket{numbers=[1, 14, 17, 21, 28], stars=[5, 2]}
Ticket{numbers=[2, 6, 8, 25, 43], stars=[1, 2]}
Ticket{numbers=[12, 23, 30, 36, 41], stars=[5, 4]}
Ticket{numbers=[8, 19, 28, 37, 41], stars=[5, 9]}
Ticket{numbers=[6, 20, 22, 28, 30], stars=[5, 6]}
Ticket{numbers=[2, 3, 33, 36, 40], stars=[9, 2]}
Ticket{numbers=[20, 26, 30, 39, 50], stars=[6, 5]}
Ticket{numbers=[11, 13, 22, 30, 38], stars=[3, 6]}
Ticket{numbers=[10, 14, 17, 45, 47], stars=[8, 7]}
You’ll notice that the numbers are sorted in increasing order, except for the stars. If you then take the average of the numbers at each position, you’ll get the “winning” number, or so the magic goes.
The interesting bit though, which I’m curious about, is that if you generate more than 100 or so tickets in one go, the average is always the same. Why is this, and does it make sense?