Posted in fun, tagged color, colour, fun, puzzle on June 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Those are not blue and green spirals in the picture. They are actually exactly the same colour.
The trick is apparently that the orange and pink spirals appear to be continuous but in fact they are just little arc’s in effect tricking your eyes into seeing the aqua-green spirals as blue in one case and green in the other.
Your eyes are deceiving you.
Download the image from here and check.
[HT to Phillip Gibb who sent me a link to this]
Posted in fun, tagged fun, programming, puzzle on June 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
After yesterday’s discussion with my family at Sunday tea, I decided to write a computer simulation of the Monty Hall problem.
This is not a fancy thing with graphics etc. but a basic JAVA program that randomly (according to JAVA’s Random class) assigned a car, picked the contestant’s door, opened the appropriate door and summed, over 1,000,000,000 iterations, the win/loose chances of staying or switching. The following are the % of times that strategy won:
swap = 66.66721%
stay = 33.33278%
I realised after finishing the code that the code did not use the open variable (which represents the door the host opened), in other words it could calculate the stats without actually knowing which door the host opened after the players initial choice.
The meat of the code therefore reduced to:
int behind = random.nextInt(3); // this is where the car is
int choice = random.nextInt(3); // this is the contestant’s choice
if (choice == behind) stay++; // staying results in win
else swap++; //swapping results in a win
Looking at that code is, to me, probably the clearest explanation of the result.
Posted in fun, tagged frustrating, fun, puzzle on June 28, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I few days ago I posted about bags of gold and choices and statistics. If you have not read it go and read it now 
To day I am going to post the answer. but before I get there…
Posted in fun, tagged bag, coin, fun, gold, silver on June 24, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Posted in family, tagged Alicia, celebrate, Chrystina, family, fatherhood, fathers day on June 21, 2009 | 2 Comments »
This morning after receiving my awesome fathers day gift (sorry no pictures, most of it has been eaten) I picked CJ up and told her that despite the fact that it was Fathers day that the day was actually about her. After all if it were not for her (and later Alicia) I would not even be a father.
Posted in family, tagged Chrystina on June 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
There is a boy in Chrystina’s class that has stepsisters aged 19 and 21. His sisters apparently dress him up like a little doll. So here is a boy who has no qualms about putting his hair up in a pony tail and applying lipstick and mascara. I had a chat with his (Daniel’s) mom this morning and she said she has to hide her jewelry from him.
Posted in family, tagged Alicia, Chrystina, family, fatherhood, household, love, Marla, marriage, parenting on June 6, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I have not posted here in a while. Why, you ask…
Priorities! Over the past 2 months I have had to decide many times to do one thing over another. Ok a lot of the time there is no real choice, its just that some things get done and some other things don’t get done.
Andy Stanley (@AndyStanley on twitter) once said that there is always too much to do and not enough time to do it all, so you have to choose who you are going to cheat. Cause you are going to cheat someone or something so choose wisely.
