Thought Shower

The Euromillions lottery jackpot today is £166 million pounds. To hit the Jackpot you need to correctly pick 5 numbers between 1 and 50 and two numbers between 1 and 11. The odds of you achieving this are apparently 117 million to one (according to the euromillions own website) To demonstrate just how unlikely that is, lets have a maths lesson. Of course, your odds are 117 million to one if you pick something like 3 15 28 37 43 4 8. What if you picked 1 2 3 4 5 6 7? Never going to happen right? Actually your odds of winning are exactly the same. Still going to buy a ticket? In statistics you figure out the likelyhood of an event occuring and assign it a number between 0 and 1 (0 means zero chance and 1 means certain). Lets think about a coin to make things simple. The likelyhood of flipping a 'Head' is 0.5 and the likelyhood of flipping a 'Tail' is 0.5 (in any given flip). So what are the odds of flipping two Heads in a row? Well we take the odds and multiply them...

Digging through my pile of unwatched DVDs I came across this movie from David Cronenberg, one of my favourite directors of all time. HERE WE GO Dead Ringers is the tale of the Mantle twins, Elliot and Beverly, a pair of gynaecologist brothers who share everything, including women. The pair pair have built a reputation as the best in their field, but everything begins to unravel when Bev starts falling for one of their conquests, a former patient and beautiful actress. Slowly he becomes obsessed with her and begins becoming involved with her drug habit... The first thing that needs to be mentioned about this movie is Jeremy Irons central performances as the twins themselves. He manages to infuse the two roles with enough individuality that you are never at a loss as to which twin is on screen with Elliot the brash, off-hand brother and Bev the sensitive soul. As the movie progresses and the characters devolve his performance takes on a terrifying other dimension of a man (men) losing th...

In an attempt to save some money I have decided to make a concerted effort to tackle my massive stack of unwatched DVDs instead of just buying new ones all the time, some of which I have had in my collection for years! So, the first film I decided to pop in was Park Chan-Wook's 'Lady Vengeance'. A film that has been sitting unwatched on my shelf for about 6 years now. The story follows our heroine as she is released from prison after 13 years after being wrongly convicted of the kidnapping and murder of a young child. It soon becomes apparent that she knows who the real perpetrator is, and has been plotting her revenge throughout her sentence... If there is one word to describe this film it's this; bleak. There are no flashes of dark humour here that have been present in the director's previous works, nor is there any let up from reminders that we are dealing with child-killers here and all the horrific connotations that brings. I can admire the film-making on displ...

The Green Hornet was reviewed pretty poorly when it came out, in fact it's currently holding a rating of 45% at rotten tomatoes and I'm sort of struggling to figure out why. Maybe it was because the movie changed hands so frequently during it's production (Kevin Smith and Stephen Chow were both attached to direct before Michel Gondry eventually brought the film to completion) that many critics walked in expecting a turkey, maybe it was part of a backlash against the increasingly ubiquitous Seth Rogen or maybe it was because the film bucks the current trend for dark and gritty takes on classic super-hero tales, instead going for campy humour, who knows? All I can say is that I thoroughly enjoyed the film. The story centres around Brit Reid, millionaire playboy who (with assistance from his butler Kato) becomes a masked vigilante after the death of his father, the twist being that he decides to pose as a criminal in order to better infiltrate the LA underworld... The film is ...

I originally posted this on the mondomovie.com forum in a thread discussing the 4 minutes of cuts levelled at 2010 horror/thriller 'A Serbian Film' but I thought I'd post it here also for posterity. Some good discussion here so I'll weigh in. I enjoyed the film greatly, but I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because I was expecting a gritty, Guinea Pig-style torture porn and what I got was an almost Hollywood level of gloss coupled with some fun performances and set-pieces that in the end left me feeling like I had watched a hollywood thriller rather than a notorious horror. I think this is exemplified in the opening shot of the title, projected from old, scratchy stock accompanied by piano music is smashed to bits as the (frankly excellent) electronic score kicks in letting you know to drop your pre-conceptions immediately. As has been mentioned in this thread, I never felt shocked by the so-called offensive content because it never felt real to me. Be it th...

Did anyone else consider that 'Superbad' may be a pseudo-sequel to 'Hot Tub Time Machine' in which the kid with glasses goes back in time to subtly help Jonah Hill and Michael Cera get laid? The clues are there if you look for them...

I have a terrible memory for what films I've seen in a given year, haha. So for ease of making this list I've used this to pick my faves. In alphabetical order: Buried - Great performance and tense as hell, thrilled me to the end. Disappearance of Alice Creed, The - Fun thriller with a great twisty plotline. Exit Through the Gift Shop - My pick of the year's documentaries, fascinating and thought provoking. Inception - What more can be said, for me it drags in the final third but by then the visuals, sci-fi plot and insane action had me hooked. Jackass 3D - Most fun I've had in a cinema, possibly ever. Kick-Ass - Ran out to buy it on blu-ray on the day of release. Great music, comedy and action. Monsters - Transcends it's 'creature feature' premise and becomes a thing of beauty. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - Most unique film of the year. At once a celebration and a biting satire of youth culture. Social Network, The - Again, what more can be said? Incredibl...

I'm kind of obsessed with counting systems. Maybe it's to do with the computery things I do for a living, but for some reason I find them fascinating. They are truly the language of nature. From the tiny acorns of 1+1=2 the mighty oaks of mathematics -and thus physics, the basis for much of our understanding of the natural world and modern lives- do grow. So let's do some counting! There are many counting systems but the best one we have come up with so far is known as the 'positional system' or 'place-value notation'. It's the one you use every day. Count up from 0-9 then carry the one, then count up from 0-9 again. This is base 10 because you count up 10 numbers before moving over one column. In computation we use binary which is a base 2 counting system. Simply count from 0-1 then carry the one then count from 0-1 again. Easy peasy! 16 8 4 2 1  1 0 1 0 1 The binary number above is representing 1+4+16=21. Binary is useful because it only uses two charc...

This post is about programming so if that doesn't interest you then fair warned be ye, says I. Been learning C++. Out of a book. I'm just up to getting methods to work, which if you are a programmer you will know is not that far in, but it's a start damnit! So I know from experience that it is much more fun to do this kind of thing if you are making something that is actually fun and you care about, so I had a crack at Conway's Game of Life, something that I'd always wanted to do since I first heard about it. The basic premise is that you have a field of cells. Each cell dies if it is overcrowded or too lonely and cells are born if there are a specific number of living cells nearby. This gives you a fairly rudimentary but funtastic life simulator. LET'S DO IT! Features of my version: Shitty coding. (hey I'm learning) My version features no methods classes or objects or anything fancy like that just good old fashioned loops and 'if' statements. Eye wa...

I am a huge fan of the Canadian exploitation movie magazine and it's associated books/website so when they came out with their top 100 movies of the decade I thought I'd repost it to see which ones I have seen. ----------------------------------------------------- Here's the list (starred films I have seen) 1. Cocaine Cowboys (2006. Usa) 2. Spirited Away (2001. Japan)* 3. Team America: World Police (2004. Usa)* 4. Inglourious Basterds (2009. Usa)* 5. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (2004. Usa) 6. Mind Game (2004. Japan) 7. Kamikaze Girls (2004 Japan) 8. Sexy Beast (2000. UK) 9. City Of God (2002. Brazil)* 10. Wonderland (2003. Usa) 11. Capturing the Friedmans (2003. Usa)* 12. Old Boy (2003. Korea)* 13. There Will be Blood (2007. Usa)* 14. Battle Royale (2000. Japan)* 15. No Country for Old Men (2007. Usa)* 16. Not Quite Hollywood (2008. Australia)* 17. Ghost World (2001. Usa)* 18. The Road (2009. Usa) 19. Wall-E (2008. Usa)* 20. Punch Drunk Love (2002. Usa) 21. Aachi ...

So I got an iPhone for my birthday yesterday and was all excited this morning to get it up and running with apps, my music/podcasts etc and of course to do that you have to connect it up to your PC. So I plug it in to the USB port via the supplied lead and my computer crashes. 'Well it must be a fluke' I think 'Apple products are known for their ability to "just work" right? That couldn't just be marketing bullshit' I continue to think. So I reboot and plug it in again. Same thing. And this isn't just any crash either, this is a 'screen goes black, all keys cease to work, forcing a hard reset' kind of crash. So after (literally) three hours of tinkering and searching Google I have come up with a work-around. The problem was caused by the iPhone/iTunes software having a software clash with my HP Photo transfer software for transferring pictures off my digital camera (which BTW has never happened before with previous iPods or ANY OTHER SOFTWARE I...

In computer science, a recursive function is a function that calls itself it order to perform some complex calculation with relatively few commands. An acronym is a phrase for which the first letters of each individual word form a new word. Mash them together and you get infinite fun! For example; 'TIARA' is an acronym that stands for 'TIARA Is A Recursive Acronym' You could blow it up one more level and say '(TIARA Is A Recursive Acronym) Is A Recursive Acronym' Or one more level and say '((TIARA Is A Recursive Acronym) Is A Recursive Acronym) Is A Recursive Acronym' Repeat until dead.

Been playing a lot of scrabble recently. The best possible scrabble word I can think of is 'Quizzing' Of course there is only 1 'z' in scrabble so you'd need a blank tile. 'Quiz_ing' And you only get 7 letters so you'd need to put it at the end of a word such as 'sin'       s       i quiz_ing And to get the most out of it you'd have to land it on a triple word score for instance the one in the bottom left corner, which would also land your 'z' on a double letter score and your 'g' on the bottom middle triple word score. Therefore your total score would be: Q = 10, U = 1, I = 1, z = 10, N = 1, G = 2. (((10 + 1 + 1 + (10*2) + 0 + 1 + 1 + 2) * 3) * 3) = 324 plus 50 for using all 7 letters = 374

if you have one of those combination padlocks with three tumblers, each with the digits 0-9 on them that means that there are a possible 1o*10*10 combinations of numbers that can be displayed. 10*10*10 = 1000 (obviously) In order to have at least 1000 different combinations using tumblers that only have the digits 0-1 on them (the binary digits) you would have to have sufficient tumblers to display the number 999 (this is the same for the 3 tumblers using base 10, i.e. You can display 1000 numbers, all those up to 999 plus zero) You display 999 in binary like this: 1111100111 So you would need 10 tumblers. BUT the advantage is, with 10 tumblers using binary you can display a possible 1018 combinations. (1111111111 which is 1017, plus 0000000000 which is zero) Ergo 10 tumblers displaying 0-1 is much more secure and therefore sensible. QED

I'm killing time before I head down to London tomorrow morning and I'm in a mood that can only be described as super-bored and frisky, so I thought I'd write about an idea that's been gestating in my head for a few months now. Firstly a quick history lesson. Alan Turing was a British mathematician and computer scientist who is famous for his pioneering work with computers, not to mention his ground breaking work during the second world war at Bletchley Park in the field of code-breaking. This is the man who broke the Enigma code, so you know he was a smart guy. He was also a practicing homosexual in an era when it was criminalized for which he was eventually prosecuted, but that's by the by. Turing was fascinated by the idea of AI ( artificial intelligence) and he postulated that if a human could converse normally with a computer, without ever realising that it was not a human they were conversing with, then that computer would have reached a state of true artifi...

Just got back from watching Lars von Trier's latest, 'Antichrist', and I thought I'd put my thoughts down while they were still fresh in my head. If there is one word to describe this movie it is 'provocative'. Von Trier pretty much proved this at Cannes by claiming to be the world's greatest filmmaker. He wants to rile you up. He wants you to walk out and ask for your money back. He would love it if you wrote into your local newspaper and complained about 'this sick filth'. He wants all these things because it means he has affected you, be it positively or negatively, he has caused you to react to what is essentially a fancy light show. And that is the essence of film as art. Von Trier uses the tropes that you know from the horror world to created a study of grief, guilt, depression, and madness, and manages to wrap it in a fairly engaging plot regarding the two character's interactions and relationship. There has been a great deal of controvers...

...Quick Capsule Review. - Better than the first one. - Still completely over-the-top ridiculous. - Still like National Treasure more.

Ever think telling the time is just a little bit too easy? Why not throw in some maths to make it a mini test every time you check the clock? Here's a small Java program I wrote that displays the time using binary digits. It'll be second (get it?)  nature in no time! import java.util.*; /**  *  * @author D. Duncombe  */ public class Main {               /** Creates a new instance of Main */   public Main() {   }       /**   * @param args the command line arguments   */   public static void main(String[] args) {       System.out.println("*************************");   System.out.println("*** Binary Clock V1.0 ***");   System.out.println("***    D. Duncombe    ***");   System.out.println("*************************");       while (1 == 1)   {       Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();   int secondValue1 = cal.get(cal.SECOND);   int secondValue2 = secondValue1;      ...

I was thinking today about how government sponsored advertising on t.v. is able to get away with so much more than the regular adverts from normal companies. For example take the drink driving adverts you see at Christmas that are full of violence, or the anti-drug adverts with disturbing imagery. 'So', I thought, 'how could a company use similarly over the top techniques to sell their product?' This is what I came up with: We open on a pub car park. Twilight. A car pulls in and parks. A young man, maybe late teens or early twenties steps out. We follow the man as he walks into the pub, pausing briefly to hold up his car key and click the remote lock button. We see the car's lights flash once. Cut to; the young man is sitting at a table in the pub twiddling with his phone, a pint of beer sits half empty on the table in front of him. Suddenly three more men appear and his face lights up when he notices their arrival. Cut to; montage of the four friends laughing, roug...

Dear Microsoft, Simply follow this advice and I guarantee you at least one game sale. To me. Release Chu Chu Rocket on Xbox live Arcade. I would snap that up so fast it would make your eyes bleed. Here's what you do. Spruce it up with brain melting HD graphics. Keep the game-play identical to the original. Include all the original maps and game modes, while throwing in new maps and the ability for users to share their custom maps online. You could even have an option to have those silly little xbox avatars running around instead of cats and mice if you want. Of course online play would now be blazingly fast so you could even up the number of simultanious players to make it even more hectic than in the good old Dreamcast days. Think about it guys and get back to me. Oh, and don't tell me there are rights issues or whatever 'cos I can see Sega games on there right now. Cheers.