Russian roulette
OK, I got to watching the HBO mini-series Epitafios (awesome show, IMHO), where one of the main characters is in the habit of playing Russian Roulette. My instinct was to agree with the odds initially posted on the wikipedia article here and discussed here , that with no respin, the odds go up on each subsequent trigger pull: 1/6, 1/5, 1/4…. etc. to 1/1 on the sixth. I realized that this was a misreprentation of the statistics, because only one "selection" was made at the beginning of the game (the spin). So I wrote a program to simulate the game, and to my pleasant surprise, I was right, each pull is 1/6 up until the sixth pull which is 1/1.
Long story short, Russian Roulette doesn’t become successively more dangerous as you play. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never play, but this was kind of interesting to me to do the math (and a interesting example of how the self-correcting nature of Wikipedia is accessible to everybody.)
Heart attack victim saved by passing defibrillator salesman and nurses
Beer belly camelfront
Yup, it’s a beer belly drink holder so you can drink brews everywhere in public…
Sparklines
Edward Tufte , author of the Visual Display of Quantitative Information series of books (I own), came up with the concept of sparklines ….
Here’s an example from the webpage:
| 5 year | |
| Cisco |  |
Again, borrowed from Dan’s blog
3D street art
As seen on Dan’s blog , an amazing street artist’s work .
Top 10 Windows XP Tips of All Time
Some of them are kind of dumb, but some are quite clever. Check out the Yahoo article here .
Spray painting Air Force One
OK, it’s kind of fun:
First go here
And then go here
Blasting Digg
Bunch of articles decrying censorship practices at Digg :
- Digg corrupted
- Suspicious Digging
- Digg censors
- Kevin Rose responds
A tour of Microsoft’s Mac lab
Kind of neat article . Love those Mac minis.
You’ve got to be kidding.
This gentleman went door to door claiming to be a breast inspector.
Not sure how bad I feel for the victims, not really the brightest sort….
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Gallery
Date: 03/05/2007
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Weight
Now Reading
Planned books:
- All the Presidents’ Pets : The Story of One Reporter Who Refused to Roll Over by Mo Rocca
- Voice of Reason : Why the Left and Right Are Wrong by Ronn Owens
- Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News by Tucker Carlson
- 1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
- The Original Turtles Trading Notebook by Russell Sands
Current books:
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Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
Recent books:
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- A Year in the Merde by Stephen Clarke
- The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn\’t by Robert I. Sutton
