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Monthly Archives: January 2009
Homer, that’s your solution to everything: to move under the sea. It’s not going to happen!
Back in the day, there was a little show called seaQuest DSV. I watched some of it as a kid, and now I’m revisiting the series curtousey of Netflix. The show had a decent premise and a good budget, and it got me excited about science fiction as a kid.
The story is set in the year 2018, when much of the worlds ocean floors have been colonized. Now I know you’re thinking, “Who colonized the oceans? And why?” Farmers, that’s who. To farm what, I really couldn’t tell you. Does it matter? No!
OpenDNS: The underqualified IT employee’s nightmare
With all the recent talk about DNS vulnerabilities out on the interwebs, I decided it was time to start using OpenDNS. I must say, the service is pretty cool. Basically, you point your DNS requests to their IP address, and all requests go through their DNS servers. They collects stats for your network, and they even can filter your traffic based on your criteria. You can even manage multiple networks with one account, like, say, your main house, and then a vacation house in the Poconos.
Approximately 3,720 to One…
Out of the graciousness of my heart (and the promise of brownies), I decided to help some friends of mine with some probability work for their stats class. Since a few of them play cards, I decided to use poker as an analogy (and the chance to maybe win some petty cash). As we were teaching the non-poker players the various winning hands, I heard one of them ask what the chances of getting a Royal Flush was and to my astonishment one of the poker players responded “Like a million to one”.
WRONG
So I decided to give them a crash course in counting cards. Not counting cards as in the get yourself arrested for being an idiot in Vegas, but counting cards as in the probability of certain hands occurring given 52 cards. Before we can start, I’ve got a few quick notes for you. A deck has 52 cards divided into 4 suits (Hears, Diamonds, Clubs, Spades) and each suit has 13 ranks (Ace, 2-10, Jack, Queen, King). Finally, instead of the standard mathematical combination notation I’m going to use (n,k) or n choose k. If you’re not sure what a combination is, Wikipedia has a decent article.
Royal Flush: probably the easiest to figure out. There are 4 suits giving us 4 Royal Flushes total.
Honeymoons are awesome; I should get married more often
So I’m on the last day of my honeymoon. We took the train down to Miami, spent three days there, then went on a cruise to the Bahamas. Here are some things that are awesome about cruises:
- Unlimited food
- Unlimited ice cream
- Unlimited loss of money
Okay, so that last one isn’t so awesome. But I do have good news: my credit card limit is only $13,000. Also, my equilibrium is so out of whack that my hotel room is rocking back and forth. Fun stuff.