If you are what you eat, then Andrew Livesey is a ‘roast-tapas-birthday-casserole’ where as Kim Booth has clearly been snacking on too many pissed off bananas.
Peer at the pier
Birthday bash at LaNu
Sausage Fest
Al Zaguan then, why not?
JD's, other than Space, the only place to be on a sunday
Nine o fine
Banana drama
Odds on Favourites
This lesson we take a look at the exact science of gambling and probability. Over the years people have obsessed over systems and surefire ways of beating the odds; from Rain Man counting cards in the Vegas casinos to Derren Brown beating the lottery on live tv. Obviously some methods are more effective than others; find yourself a genius human-computer like Rain Man and counting cards at the Black Jack table is a pretty safe bet. Follow the advice of Darren Brown however and you’re more likely to end up trading hand-jobs for a crack fix in Skegness; probably.
If, like most of us, you’re not blessed with a massive calculator for a brain then counting cards is probably out of the question. There are other ways to guarantee a win however. Lets take a walk to the roulette table where a bet on red or black pays out at one to one (a successful bet of £10 will win £10 plus original stake). A spin of the roulette wheel is just like the toss of a coin. Each spin is independent, with a pretty much 50:50 chance of the ball landing on black or red. Contrary to intuition, a black number is just as likely to appear after a run of 20 consecutive black numbers as the seemingly more likely red. This randomness means there is a way of using probability to ensure a profit: always bet on the same colour, and if you lose, double your bet on the next spin. Because your colour will come up eventually, this method will always produce a profit. The downside is that you’ll need a big pot of cash to stay in the game: a losing streak can escalate your bets very quickly. Seven unlucky spins on a £10 starting bet will have you parting with a hefty £1280 on the next. Unfortunately your winnings don’t escalate in the same way: when you do win, you’ll only make a profit equal to your original stake. So while the theory itself is sound, be careful. The roulette wheel is likely to keep on taking your money longer than you can remain solvent. There are more calculated ways of gambling, leaving the casino let’s head of to the bookies.
Although each bookie will stack their own odds in their favour, thus ensuring that no punter can place bets on all the runners in a race and guarantee a profit, that doesn’t mean their odds will necessarily agree with those of a different bookie. And this is where gamblers can seize their chance. Let’s take, for example, the Oxford – Cambridge boat race. One bookie may offer 3 to 1 on Cambridge to win and 1 to 4 on Oxford. But a second bookie disagrees and has Cambridge evens (1 to 1) and Oxford at 1 to 2. Each bookie has looked after his own back, ensuring that it is impossible for you to bet on both Cambridge and Oxford with him and make a profit regardless of the result. However, if you spread your bets between the two bookies, it is possible to guarantee success. Having done the calculations, you place £37.50 on Cambridge with bookie 1 and £100 on Oxford with bookie 2. Whatever the result you make a profit of £12.50. Guaranteeing a win this way is known as “arbitrage”, but opportunities to do it are rare and fleeting. The maths is easiest to do when there are only two possible outcomes, i.e. win or loose. Good places to spot possible arbs are with big football matches where bookies may favour their home team; finals are good as draws are out of the question. The next step is betting at the dogs which will tend to have up to 6 runners meaning the maths is still manageable as apposed to the horses which can have anything up to 15 riders. Online gambling has given a hole new scope to betting with people making a good living from arbitrage.
Before you sack in your day job and start your new career as a mathematician there are a few things you must first consider. Situations where arbitrage is viable are hard to find and once found the maths of calculating what bets to make is quite tricky. In order to see variable returns your stakes are going to have to be quite high, meaning if you make a mistake with your maths your losses can be high too. One massive downfall in the system comes in the bookies’ right to cancel bets. Although not a problem for your average gambler this can result in massive losses for arbers and will undoubtedly lead back to hand jobs in Skegness.
Is there anybody out there?
Star Whores
In 1986 Joe Davis sent a message to 2 neighbouring star systems, Eridani and Tau Ceti. The content of his messages was subject to so much controversy that after only a few minutes of transmission the project was shut down by the US air force. Davis, an artist and research affiliate at MIT, had become concerned that no representation of human genitals had been sent into space. To remedy this oversight he led the project which would later go on to transmit the sounds of vaginal contractions to neighbouring star systems. In order to ensure the best sound quality Davis enlisted the help of ballet dancers and their toned contractions. Although the messages will have arrived at their destinations in the late 90s we are still waiting on a reply.
Over the next few decades humanity filled the universe with messages beamed at the locations that scientists believe could support life. One star in particular, Ursae Majoris 47, has been subject to a veritable bucket load of intergalactic spam. One notable example came from a group of Russian teenagers led by Alexander Zaitsev who sent an analogue signal of a piece of electronic music recored on a theremin in 2001. Seven years later in 2008 the star was subject to a 6 hour broadcast of a Doritos advert. Earlier in the year NASA had broadcast The Beatles song Across the Universe to celebrate the agency’s 50th anniversary. What must our neighbours think we do with our time here on earth?
The horse head nebula
Whether or not these messages will ever be received and what reactions they invoke we may never know. Not having received any messages ourselves may mean, as many believe, that we are alone in the universe. It may of course mean the we don’t have the technology to accept signals that have been sent to us. One thing is for sure, Joe Davis was sending cunts into space long before Richard Branson.
Back once again with the renegade master. Andrew Livesey takes us through another week on the island.
Grocery shopping in Santa Gertudis
Complements to Pete the Butcher
Selecting some Office Listening
Playing hide and seek with Nile
Some plonker drives into the sea
B52s at Lo Cura closing party
A beautiful day walking home from work
After a lovely roast dinner courtesy of Baxter and Miss W I got to thinking about gravy. One of life’s true pleasures, a good gravy can be delicious, nutritious and also educational. Today I want to concentrate on one of the key ingredients of a good gravy – cornflour.
If you have ever made gravy using cornflour then you will have no doubt encountered its mysterious ways. Mixed with water it creates a Non-Newtonian fluid (another good example of this is instant custard). Under certain conditions a Non-Newtonian fluid will behave just like a regular liquid but also, in other situations, in particular when agitated, it will behave like a solid. This is why when your mixing your cornflour it will sometimes become ‘unmixable’, and also why it is so good at thickening a sauce. These strange properties, which arise form the irregular atomic layout of these materials, give way to some interesting uses. For example the solid like properties of a Non-Newtonian fluid mean that if you had a big enough supply then you could walk quite comfortably across it. (Perhaps an explanation to Jesus’ exploits in Galilee..?) Strange things also happen when you vibrate Non-Newtonian fluids; giving us a use for our old speakers.
The opposite to a Non-Newtonian fluid is a Bingham Plastic; all together less interesting in my opinion. A Bingham plastic will behave like a solid until it is agitated, at which point it will behave like a liquid. A classic example of this is, staying with the food theme, tomato ketchup. Held upside down, Ketchup will remain stuck to the side of the bottle (acting as a solid) but will start to flow (acting as a liquid) when the bottle is tapped. These properties are also put to use in part in the manufacture of paint which is required to flow freely from the brush and also not drip too much when on the wall.
Saucy science
