Archive for September, 2009

I’ve just watched through Derren Brown’s “how to win the lottery” in which Derren (supposedly) correctly predicted the lottery numbers for last Wednesday’s national lottery draw. Last night he offered to explain how he did it. Of course in reality, he still leaves you wondering.

His explanation was that it used the “wisdom of crowds” which suggests that subconsciously a group of people can make more accurate predictions than one person alone, and in his example he took 24 people, had them study the lottery numbers for the past year and try and work out which ones came next. He then averaged them out and claimed to have successfully predicted the numbers.

That or, as a final end to the show briefly discusses how we could have fixed the lottery to make sure that the right numbers came up. Of course he claimed this theory was both illegal and ridiculous and this is for the most part true – I think we can rule out that Derren and his team actually managed to get through security and fix the draw.

So how did he manage it? Derren begins his show on Friday by listing the three possibilities by which he could have done it. Faked a lottery ticket, genuinely predicted the numbers or fixed the draw.

However this is where it begins to break down. Where have we seen such an example before? The answer of course is “bad, mad or god.” The classic Christian proposition that Jesus was either evil, crazy or he actually was the son of god. Immediately ruling out the idea that he could have been mistaken, never claimed to be god or never existed at all, to name just a few of other possibilites.

Derren begins by ruling out his first suggestion and leaving us with just two possibilities – either he correctly predicted the numbers or he fixed the draw. He then dismisses the second idea and offers us a very dubiously scientific but almost believable senario and invites us to “believe, or not.”

In reality of course, the first lines Derren spoke on the show were the most accurate. “This show uses magic, trickery and misdirection” he proclaims boldly and yet we still do not appreciate on what scale it is – that the entire one hour show is a misdirection leading us down the garden path to draw attention away from the fact that there is was something a little dodgy about the stand the predictions were held on – which couldn’t be revealed in advance for legal reasons.

We rack our brains trying to work out whether his theory of crowds could actually work and so much thought do we put into this that it never occurs to us that the 24 people predicting the numbers are probably in on the trick – or that Derren ignored the numbers they predicted and only “revealed” to them the numbers they had predicted when the lottery draw had been made.

Not that this takes away the magic of it. Derren put on a superb performance and one which I would highly recommend watching. Just remember that you’re still watching a magic show.

Or at least, that is my take on it. You can believe, or not.

By Wednesday evening Lil had been up for over 24 hours having worked nights on Tuesdays and then fueled herself up on Relentless. Or crack, it’s hard to tell the difference when someone the size of Lil drinks an entire can of Relentless. As we haven’t seen the can, or the crack, whichever one it actually was, I guess we’ll never know.

So the obvious thing to do in this situation was to head over to Nicola’s 09/09/09 party celebrating the fact it was the 9th of September 2009 – an idea she had only made up the night before while drunk at the A-Soc social and had just invited “very special friends” to despite the fact that there were over 70 people on the Facebook guest list.

Last night saw the usual weekly A-Soc summer social at the Cuthbert Brodrick for much steak and drinking. As ever a good time was bad by all, except Rich, who we managed to drive crazy with talk about the logo. On the plus side however, Kate and Steven are now “official” according to Rich.

Interestingly Sophie couldn’t make it and Paul cancelled on us at the last minute leading us to the conclusion that Paul is actually in control of, and indeed has been in control of, the society all along through his puppets, myself, Norm and now Sophie. We always suspected, but never guessed…

Went to the Deer Park with Si and Sarann on Monday for old times sake. All the bar staff seem to know us now which is weird as they never seemed to when we lived round the corner but now I only go in there occasionally they seem to love us – maybe that’s hint 😀 .

Things have changed though. I didn’t get a mixed grill, Si didn’t get a burger – what has become of us? Actually I did get a mixed grill, but it was a fish rather than a meat one. I also had to stop Si in his tracks ordering me a WKD as I went for a white wine instead. Crazy times.

I’m also considering doing a survey on how many of my blog posts end in either crazy or fun times.

Sunday lunch took the usual form of heading down to the Cuthbert Brodrick for some steak. It’s go great that we can all get together once a week and spend our time together each on our own smart phones browsing the web :D. Good times!

Lil was working the night shift on Saturday and with myself and Norm both accidentally having the weekend off, I headed over to Seacroft for a beer or two.

I stopped off at Nando’s on my way to get some food and claim my free half a chicken :D. Of course I had to spend £5.80 to get the stamp and Tom didn’t want anything so I ended up with a chicken pita meal with chips and coleslaw as well as half a chicken.

Needless to say, I dined rather well that night :D.

In today’s ultra P.C. nanny culture the posters informing you what to do if there is a fire might as well not be there. As such I’ve decided to provide some practical tips on fire safety.

• If the fire alarm goes off, ignore it, it’s probably a test.
• If there is a fire, don’t walk – run! There’s a fire for god’s sake!
• Go back for personal possessions – you don’t want them to get burnt.
• If you are in a high rise building, use the lift, it will be quicker to escape the fire that way
• Bare in mind vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly. They may not be able to move as fast so you may need to push them out of the way.
• If the fire is small, just run for it, there is no glory in putting it out. Only attempt to tackle large blazes in which you stand a chance of getting on the front cover of The Express.
• Remember, safety first – wait until you are a safe distance away from the fire before attempting to take a picture with your phone and send it to TwitPic.

Having presumed I had made it through the weekly bout of A-Soc events I soon found myself up two hours early on Friday morning to attend a design meeting because there was opposition to continuing the discussions in the main committee meeting the night before.

So myself, Zoltan and Michael met up in Tasty for a breakfast meeting at which I thought was rather productive though it later turned out this was not a view held by all parties.

This resulted in A-Soc work dragging on long into the night as we are still trying to work out an effective logo we can use for the society this year. I also spent a large amount of timing implementing new features on the website and checking over everything, updating copy, etc. Let it never be said the society doesn’t keep you busy!

Wednesday night saw the A-Soc craft session to try and figure out what we were going to do in terms of our public image and branding as well as making some stuff for freshers’ week. We spent a good hour or so debating how to turn a large piece of cardboard into a box before Norm turned up and pointed out we could just use a ready made cardboard box which would be significantly easier.

Thursday saw our first proper committee meeting of the new year at which we worked our way through almost twenty points in a bit of a marathon meeting which went on for 4 hours.

Having been up until 2am for the meeting the day before and at the social the day before I was glad get to bed on Thursday night having done nothing but be at work or at some kind of A-Soc meeting since Monday! Fun times.

Tuesday night was the usual A-Soc social though attendance was a bit slow to pick up – it starts at 7pm and people actually waited until then to turn up. So myself and Tom having got there at 6:20 because I expected people to already be there by then had a bit of a wait for company. It did however provide a rather nice gap for us to sink a few first.

Reassuringly, Paul put in an appearance having been missing for the previous few weeks so it was good to see him again. And, as ever, the steak was very nice.