“
And yet, his inner voice refused to pipe down. “I remember telling myself that the Ontario Lottery is a multibillion-dollar-a- year business,” he says. “They must know what they’re doing, right?”
That night, however, he realized that the voice was right: The tic-tac-toe lottery was seriously flawed. It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off—the ticket could be cracked if you knew the secret code.
The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.)
” —From “Cracking the Scratch Lottery” over on Wired.
This is just one example of why math is SO FUCKING COOL and why statistics should be a staple of the high school math curriculum.
(Source: Wired)
nontrapreneur: Entrepreneurship as Social Evil -
Little-e entrepreneurship is the charming eccentricity that drives business innovation in our culture and economy.
It’s a willingness to accept risks that others would shy away from, in exchange for eventual rewards nobody else can see.
It’s the Earliest Adopter’s enthusiasm for a fad that…
“The marriage in medicine between pathophysiology and man is best exemplified by MP.” — Found by my wife while researching medical residency applications. If you can make it past paragraph two of the sample “Personal Statement” before getting up from your computer, going down to your local gun shop, acquiring several firearms, tracking down “Jeff Gonzalez, MD Resident, Department of Medicine, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania; MAC Governing Council, Resident and Fellow Section Representative” and demonstrating to him exactly how the marriage between pathophysiology and man is best exemplified by your sawed-off, well, you’re a braver person than I. And a lot more persistant. And violent, sheesh.
(Source: ama-assn.org)
We’re not saying which one…
(seen in a hospital in Lima, Peru)
Last night I had a dream that while at my elementary school, to meet up with some friends I hadn’t seen in years, the tires on my car disintegrated. And there wasn’t enough time for me to get them replaced before my trip up north, so I had to take the motorcycle which was low on gas so I rode it very slowly the whole way. And then I walked through the back hallways of some hotel looking for a phonebook to call…I don’t remember who. I got some weird looks from the cleaning ladies, though.
Then I woke up and saw this outside my window. Read into it however you’d like, but I think the pretty obvious explanation is that I have a latent mutant power to control the weather.
NO BLASTERS!: You Don't Need to See His Identification -
On November 21, 2010, I was allowed to enter the U.S. through an airport security checkpoint without being x-rayed or touched by a TSA officer. This post explains how.
Edit: This is a rough draft, but I wanted to get it up sooner than later. For now, the quotes below are paraphrases. I have…
Bad drivers of America: the left turn lane is NOT your personal fucking merge lane. If you can’t make it completely into the proper driving lanes out of whatever strip mall you’ve stranded yourself in, then you need to WAIT. Or, make a right turn and find somewhere nearby to correctly utilize the left turn lane. Then one more right turn and you’re on your way! Everytime you purposely pull into a left turn lane because there is too much cross traffic, you are endangering everyone on the road. STOP IT.
[video]
Get yer hands off my internets -
The Obama administration’s stance toward all things internet-related (including DMCA and digital media) has really been (for me) the biggest disappointment of his presidency. I’m normally willing to allow certain leniencies, e.g. the Iraq war, because I know those issues are super complicated and fucked up and who am I to really know what’s going on?
But this? Well, honestly this just sucks. And it’s sad, because this was an area during the election where I really thought Obama would have the right priorities in place and make an actual effort to promote an open and fair internet. But, well…blech.
(p.s. thx @hypomodern for the link).