surprise!

rich people get accountants in order to try to pay as little tax as possible.

journalists lie to make a story sound good (including, shockingly, taking quotes out of context!)

politicians are hypocrites


feel free to add your own

mindlessscrap

there used to be this great website called mindlesscrap that had fantastic trivia. a fact I remember was that there's only one word in the English language which changes its pronunciation when the first letter is capitalised. And that word is polish.

you may have noticed that the euros are happening in Poland and the Ukraine. apparently, my friend got told off for calling it the Ukraine instead of just Ukraine. but sometimes I think the 'the' is necessary.

anyway, that part of the world isn't known for its acceptance of other races so imagine my complete lack of surprise when i saw the headline that Eusebio, aka the black Pele, "was taken to polish hospital"

friday rounds up

well, i was about to hand a post of the week to someone other than yakshi but then he wrote this.

this the last workday of freedom i'll have for at least a month. although the way i'm looking at my job is that they're paying me to learn vba which is something i was kinda doing for myself anyway!

other than this the times are currently uninteresting. i need to find something more interesting to do. will work on updating my goals panel at the top right..

x men powers are unrealistic. but...

heroes, less so.

i guess it's not as famous as x-men but heroes is much more realistic. in terms of superpowers anyway. when you look at how people and superpeople would interact, x-men may not be far off.

you may think this is a set up for a joke, or at least hope that's what it is because the alternative is that i sound mental, but this is a serious science.

for those that don't know, heroes is a show with people who have superpowers. superpowers are cool. everyone wants them. i would like mind reading or invisibility. though as i said recently i think i would choose being able to control space time. but those aren't realistically going to be the first ones we get. realistic ones are perfect memory, calculator minds, perfect drawing abilities or having perfect pitch. these aren't actually too different from heroes powers. and imagine being able to choose ones you see in other people! (eg peter petrelli)

you may have noticed that these realistic 'powers' i mentioned are those that savants have. now imagine you could temporarily give yourself those powers? well, a scientist has already done that. ('testing' his theories on his PhD students no less!)

currently, this requires the use of a 'thinking cap'

commercial devices have for some time existed which allow you to control your computer using your mind (eg the now discontinued 'neural impulse actuator' or intendix)

imagine if you could learn these skills without the need for an external stimulus!

and that is really the only step required to superpowers.

once you've learned to control your mind to such an extent, the 'savant' powers are surely available. some of the more remote heroes powers are potentially viable, such as regeneration - after all, many animals can already do so. telekinesis which is very cool may be slightly problematic even at that stage.

the next step however, could be the most interesting. if you can focus your mind, and the em waves that are used, you may be able to 'see' other peoples minds due to their em waves. after all, em waves interact with each other. and that leads to the slightly more remote possibility of being able to affect others without the use of anything external, simply(!) using your own mind. and then the possibilities of what you can do are both scary and seemingly endless.

goal line technology

instead of using cameras or other technology to decide if a ball has crossed a line, uefa in their wisdom added two people who will sometimes have a good view. and even when they have a good view they still get decisions wrong.
yet to introduce technology they want it to get the decision right 100% of the time. surely getting it right 80% of the time is still better than having people who aren't that accurate?

even stranger is when they defended being archaic using one of their principles which is 'to have solidarity between all levels of the game'. they seem to have given up using this defence which disappoints me. i would have liked to see champions league football with the same principles as a sunday league game*.

we would see things such as:
the linesman are selected from the substitutes (one for each team).
referees able to ignore said linesman as and when they see fit (inc offside decisions)
nets put up by the home team players shortly before kick off
undersoil heating not allowed


i've also read a lot of people say it's bad because it opens up a can of worms. eg ukraine's non goal when the ball crossed the line was offside anyway from a couple of passes earlier. so two wrongs make a right for them(!?). and being able to cut out one error of judgement entirely is bad. i wonder if they advocate getting rid of linesmen too? or maybe because they aren't perfect it's ok to keep them.
so how about a goal line technology that is only 90% accurate? because that is what they have! why not make it 99%?


*sunday league is FA sanctioned rather than UEFA but perhaps the FA has to obey UEFA?

terrible news

i think i found a job. whilst applying for my one a day i got a phone call from someone i barely knew offering my a job. how ironic.

went to see them today, and it is temporary work which is good because i can then not have to stay too long. the problem is that it's outside of london and commuting far far away is massively annoying.
also this means i'll have to get up early.

on the plus side, it's a great working atmosphere and actual money which i can then use to populate my poker account and not get annoyed at playing mouthbreathers at 10c20c but instead get annoyed at 50c/$1 mouthbreathers.

the best thing is that if i get one of the few jobs i applied for i can leave quit easily. my applying for one job a day means i lost track of many jobs that i applied for but there are 4 i want to do. one i hear from this week. one next week. and two others in about a month. so add in interview times and responses etc means i could easily work 3 months before getting a preferential job so three months of money would be nice.

and the best part is that i know i would suddenly start running well at poker making more than the job! (though that would mean i have to get around to play poker again)

the best chocolates in the world

i like chocolate. i believe uk chocolates are the best although this may be because i was brought up here eating them. or maybe it's simply because they are the best.

american chocolate is appalling. and all the bars are named wrongly. (eg milky ways are called mars bars!?)
swiss chocolate has a very high opinion of itself. they never relax and put anything with the chocolate like caramel or even honeycomb. plus, the chocolate is generally too bitter. much like swiss people when they think of non swiss chocolate.

so uk chocolate is the best. the problem is that there are so many bars to choose from. so here is your definitive guide to the best, complete with name, description and special skill:

mars
a rich man's milky way.
bonus: is a roman warlord

twirl
a flake that doesnt crumble into a million pieces when you look at it
bonus: the double meaning when you ask your girlfriend to give you a twirl never wears thin. never.

maltesers
chocolate and honeycomb combined; lighter than air. i can fit at least 20 in my mouth
bonus: so light that it takes more calories to eat than you receive from it

dairy milk
comes in a million flavours, including 'normal', 'caramel filled', 'half replaced by air but the same price', 'mint', and many others.
bonus: i can eat over half a kilo of this and not feel at all sick.

terry's chocolate orange
as the saying goes, if it looks like an orange, sounds like an orange and tastes like an orange, then it probably is a duck.
bonus: counts as one of your five-a-day

plane journeys

i dont know why but people often ask me why plane journeys are different times in different directions for the same journey. everyone's best guess is that it's due of the spin of the earth, presumably because when the earth is spinning the opposite way to the plane it's a shorter journey.

most scientists know better and will say of course it's not because of the spin of the earth.

ironically, it is because of the spin of the Earth, but for a very different reason.

when the sun heats the earth, the poles get less heat than the equator. so there is a transfer of heat, via wind that takes hot air at the top of the atmosphere to the poles. cold air below it moves from the poles to the equator to fill the gap left (equalising the pressure).
due to the earth's spin, the coriolis force causes this wind, in the northern hemisphere to become an easterly wind (which counter intuitively means from the east, not to the east) near the equator and vice versa in the southern hemisphere. this causes an effective eddie current where at more northern latitudes, the wind's move in the opposing direction.

All this, is of course a generalisation, so only describes the overriding patterns that are found.

This is the explanation for prevailing winds (which leads to prevailing ocean currents). And it's these prevailing winds which cause the plane journey times to differ, as it's quicker to travel with the wind.

one last piece of counter-intuitive information is that when planes take off AND land they want to do both into the wind as this gives more stopping power and for take off, more lift!

kinda busy this weekend so forgot to play poker but have almost solve my c++ algorithm that was driving me mental.

todays friday round up with actual round up content

l'il dave's blog has been added to the roll. well written tales from a high roller.

post of the week, involves expert usage of the word 'fuckball'

persons to bring back from blogging wilderness
alexandra!

favourite search terms that have found me in the past month are
'ryan reynolds' and 'done a britta'

got stuck on a c++ exercise i was doing, and it drove me mental so i stopped doing anything for days. gonna try to ignore it and get back to learning more. found an exercise for building a game which should be cool as i'll finally be doing something useful! crackhead manager will be appearing sooner rather than later.

oh yeah, might play a bit of poker this weekend again. have finally calmed down after playing so terribly last time!

iRobot

i spent a minute trying to see the letters in the word on the right before i saw that i was expected to type not one but two words! five minutes of looking at the 'word' on the left and the only conclusion i can draw is that i am a robot.



anyway, i just found out that you can google 'english person' and look at the first website that comes up. and then laugh. the only thing that worries me is that doesn't all humour has an element of truth to it?

turning chat off

some people turn chat off in the poker.
sometimes, even though you know you shouldn't be affected by the words of others, it still affects you. and it's easier just to turn it off and not know than have to hear it and then choose to be unaffected by it.

i think it would be nice to be able to turn chat off for some people in real life too. (eg football commentators)
i used to be better at filtering out other people talking, but i got worried i would start doing it all the time without being able to control it.

no regrets

back when i was at university, i lived in a wonderous house, occasionally co-habited by mice. turns out tom and jerry style mouse traps are useless as mice just eat the cheese. even if you glue the cheese to the trappy part, they just eat around the glue.

on my walks back home from the pub, there used to be a short cut that included a few banks of steps that were very tall, a minutes walk away. occasionally i would see how far i could jump down them. then, one winter's night, on my walk home, mildly emboldened by alcohol i tried to jump the entire lot of ~10-15 steps. i landed successfully on both feet. success however, is measured by many things. in this case the only success was that i didnt fall over and roll down the next flight. though that may have been better than landing and not bending my knees which is what i did.

the pain that shot through my heels was immense. after a very slow reaction to the pain, i collapsed on the floor to take the weight off my legs. lying on my back, after about 3 minutes i realised it was bloody freezing and i needed to get home before freezing to death. that walk home took my about 15 minutes and involved me walking like an old lady who needed a zimmer frame, but without the zimmer frame. i spent three days in bed unable to walk before i was able to go to a doctor to check it out. though i was just told, "come back if it gets worse."

it did get better shortly afterwards so i was able to start walking again but i felt the pain occasionally for about 2 years afterwards.

so anyone that ever tells you, "you only regret the things you didn't do, and not the things you did do" is wrong.

(anyway, you shouldn't have any regrets - you can't change the past, only the future.)

a terrible injury?

maybe this is just how i read it, but Bolt was in a car crash in 2009, was injured and taken to hospital. was he taken to hospital with a damaged leg? with cuts and bruises? no. and this is how it was reported:

"In 2009 police said Bolt, also the 200m world record holder, was taken to hospital with a female after an accident in Jamaica."

i think it's pretty sexist of the bbc to say the female is an injury.

work in progress

almost 3 days since a post, and it feels like a while!

having now run out of money and with lots of expensive things to fix (car, tooth, etc) it seems my desperation meters for getting a job are quite high so may even try temping. i only want to work for a month or so just to pay for a few things i need done imminently. how i pine for the days when i used to be good at poker. or had money in my poker accounts.

i have decided that if i could have any superpower it would be that of controlling time and space. i think mind reading would ruin the surprise, even though it would make better at poker than the love child of stu ungar and quincy capers.
far fetched as superpowers sound, a professor recently told me it's not at all far fetched. i am in the midst of writing a futurism post, and for a sneak preview, watch series 1 of heroes. (DO NOT WATCH SEASONS BEYOND THAT, for it turneth into excrement).

angry!

why does poker still make me angry??

i dropped down to shit levels to play shit players and losing to submental random button clickers is very frustrating! i don't care whether it's through bad beats or hilarious preflop calls such as cold calling 3bets pre with 63s and hitting a flush on the turn or 76 for 20% of your stack and flopping a magnificent 77x vs me.

i've seen this so many times and for so long so why does it still annoy me?!

i also get very annoyed by people disturbing me when playing - they see i'm concentrating on something else but just don't care and keep talking to me. worse still is they often have ample opportunity to talk to me when it's not late at night yet refrain from doing so. and when these effects combine there's a hulk-rage switch which goes off inside my head.

i know what i should be focussing on and how my mental approach should be but just don't seem to able to do it. maybe i should just quit entirely.
anyway, down to $100 now.

here's a picture from the beach today.



i couldn't be bothered to go down to the beach beach since it's sandy and sand is just annoying. plus it wasn't even warm. i have fond mammories of this beach. when i was a kid i saw a topless sunbather. probably my first pair of real life breasts. and they were magnificent. it kinda made every pair since a bit of a let down, i think only one pair i've seen since compares.

what to post?

i have a bunch of drafts which lie somewhere between idea stage and almost ready to post stage but i think i have already posted some of them. so why are they still saved as drafts? this annoys me as i dont like repeating posts.

as you can see, i have just learnt the beauty of asking questions when speaking. it quit engages the audience (you). we are now engaged. congratulations!

i started playing a bit of the poker almost daily again. i quite like it. winning helps. though today was my first losing day. i briefly reached just over $200 which is ok, after stating with 70(?) last week. and i've only been playing very short spells (<60mins) once per day. really need to work on my patience though.
i think i also found a poker blog to add the roll (i'm saving that for a friday post). post of the week which i'm also saving till friday seems to once again have been won by yakshi. that'll wait till friday mostly because there's two magnificent posts there and i can't decide which is best. so in j-j-jimmy style i'll reread them to see which has the most staying power.

seeing as it's summer i'm off to the beach tomorrow/today. fully kitted out in winter jacket, hat and possibly scarf. it is after all a british summer.

the best national anthems

musically speaking

1. russia
2. italy
3. france

of the worst both musically and wordly would be the uk. one year they'll probably enter it into eurovision. the national anthem is as far as i can tell just a prayer for the monarch to not die.

This weekend marked around 60 years of her sitting on the throne (too easy to make a drink more orange juice joke). i fail to see the logical years of anniversary. it's something like 25, 40, 50, 60, 75. marked by silver, ruby, gold, diamond, platinum. neither the ascending arithmetic series is logical, nor is the series of gemstones/metals associated with it.



I accidentally found myself in the middle of the celebrations. I was confused as to exactly why people were celebrating. But there were many.



This was then followed by a brazillian boats floating down the river. Anyone who hung around past 6pm will have seen many goinging back to where they started since that's where they reside. A somewhat strange exercise if you ask me. But no one did ask me.

Then, to celebrate in style, a single firework was let off. I literally blinked just beforehand and missed it. Though it did make for a nice photo of London's newest skyscraper with clouds of smoke across it.



You may have noticed that the weather was typically British and although by the end there weren't many people lining the walkway, for the many hours preceding that it was packed full of people getting drenched. at least it finally disproves this man's theory.

more fillums

less forms. job applications are so dull. they lure you in making you think it'll be a quick cover letter + CV thing, yet invariably they have a million questions and an unresponsive server.
also, they're very formulaic. films are much more interesting. well, good films are. I watched sunset boulevard. it's massively rated on imdb. i was hoping it would be good, but the high expectations just made it seem worse. without being too harsh i would give it maybe a 9/20. i liked the main guy in it at first but his character deteriorated as the film went on. it also didn't have the romantic style of other old films. how it gets rated higher than hitchcock stuff shocks me.

been playing a little poker again. i started with $5 on partypoker and about $80 on betfair and i'm gonna see if i can win a little over the next few weeks, playing 3/4 tables at a time for the next few weeks. a few hundred perhaps by end of june would be nice. my goal is £1k, but tis not an expectation, it's my target! (yeah, i know, money goals bad, volume goals good, blah blah blah, but i want money.)

things that scare me #2,361

strangely, going out is much scarier to me than doing strange things when already out, since i'm not entirely sure what normal is, probably since i don't go out that often.

just recently i went out for a burger. after finishing said burger, and it wasn't small, i was approximately as hungry as when i started. i waited 10 minutes to see if i started to register being filled up but no such luck. so i ordered another. the waitress seemed unperturbed by my behaviour so i asked if many people had ordered 2 burgers. she said a few had. obviously (to me) i then asked "how about 3?"
she looked at me, paused for a moment, and said no. i knew right then and there her pause was challenging me. she had a pretty face and i wondered if it would increase my chances to see the rest of her body if i succeeded in this challenge she had just laid down at my feet.

i rather comfortably finished the second burger but didn't feel like another. so i asked her about dessert. she seemed impressed. sadly, they didn't have my preferred dessert of soufflé or soufflé-esque cake so we paid and left.
i think i have a thing for waitresses, and there's an even hotter one at another restaurant nearby. i wonder if i could instead impress her with eating abilities.

i might first try and get some tips from the winner of this eating contest: