Tuesday, June 30, 2009

I'm a model, you know what I mean

Those of my readers who have not met me "in the flesh" so to speak, may be unaware of the fact that I am incredibly good-looking, as is testified to by the following "modeling" photo-shoot fashion magazine photos.



You might have thought that this was the work of a veteran model-slash-actor, but in fact this was my first photo-shoot since I joined the Red Eleven models and talent agency over two years ago. During this time I had worked on my poses, eventually perfecting "Blue-Squeal". I think it was worth the wait, the world is ready now, apparently they weren't in the last 12 auditions.



Brynn, the considerably less attractive model at the shoot, had been fortunate enough to fall into numerous international advertising campaigns, underwear posters and television ads for aftershave and watches and such. I tried to give him some pointers on pouting, but as you can see he didn't really listen. Models...



The one where it looks as though I'm masturbating with a small microphone was a special favorite of mine, a proverbial up-yours to the pretense of the fashion industry. This had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn't paid for my work, I was happy to share the love.

If you'd like to have these pictures in hard-copy... you'd better get down to your local magazine store and pick up a copy of Real Groove magazine, before they run out.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Good odds for Big Wednesday?

This morning when Michael Laws (on Radio Live) informed me that one third of lotto winners "knew they were going to win", it reminded me just how bad the masses and their mouth-pieces are at judging probabilities. Laws seemed to be suggesting that if one believed they were going win the lotto they had more chance of winning. Not only is this probabilistically wrong, but it is at its most basic wrong, after all, presumably TWO thirds of lotto winners didn't believe they would win the lotto - suggesting generally that one had more chance of winning if one did NOT believe they were going to win.

But even this wouldn't be correct, as it is not important what proportion of winners believed they would win or not, but how that proportion relates to what the ticket buying population believes in general about whether they will win or not. I would hazard a guess that a third of people who buy tickets believe they will win, or would say so if they did.

But you read this blog to see if the chances of winning tonight are good:

The chances against winning 1st or 2nd division are astronomical, and as we have seen for the last few weeks there is a good chance it will not go. If it does go, it won't be you, get used to the idea.

The chances of winning 3rd division (which is what we're hoping for here) are 1 in 35000. Which are fabulous odds to begin with, but lets whittle them down.

Last week 2.9 million tickets were sold, and this week an estimated 4 million will be. Last week 460 people won 3rd division, so if you increase that proportionately there should be about 634 3rd division winners, if we do it based on probability we should get 686 3rd division winners

So, lets take the 35 million prize and divvy it up between the roughly 650 3rd division winners. This gives us $53846.

These are good odds (if the prize gets past the first and second division posts)

So, what are the chances of it getting past these posts? Well, the chances of winning 1st and 2nd division with one line is 1 in 16 million each, which makes your chances of getting one or the other about 1 in 8million. With four million 6 line tickets being sold this makes 24 million lines. So when I entered this into Wolfram Alpha as (7999999/8000000) to the power 24000000 it gave me a 49.8% chance of the prize not being won in 1st or 2nd division (which shows just how difficult it is to win 1st or 2nd division!).

So taking into account this 50% chance that the prize won't make it to 3rd division we can take our 1 in 35000 chance of winning a share of the big prize and halve it...

Giving us a 1 in 70000 chance of winning $53846. Which, I'm sorry to say, are not so good odds, but are the best odds you will ever have playing lotto.

What Henry Rollins can teach us about “Character” in documentary editing.

Henry Rollins is a contradiction, the tough guy with a big heart. Watching this video this morning Henry Rollins - Man Test brought togethe...