Coin Toss's Blog

Puns for those with a higher IQ

Those who jump off a bridge in Paris are in Seine.

A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.

Dijon vu - the same mustard as before.

Practice safe eating - always use condiments.

Shotgun wedding - a case of wife or death.

A hangover is the wrath of grapes.

Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play.

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

Reading while sunbathing makes you well red.

When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I.

What's the definition of a will? It's a dead give away.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

In Democracy your vote counts. In Feudalism, your Count votes.

Acupuncture is a jab well done.

I'm putting this here for anyone who wants to refer to it.

Air

Gemini: even numbers harmonize fate's vibrations.Buy two lottey tickets swith the same numbers and keep both under thepyramid for twin power. Lucky dates: June 5, Aug. 5 and 21, Oct. 7, Dec. 5 and 9. Lucky numbers: 11, 15, 35, 39, 6, 23

Libra: Balance in all things is the key. Place yourticket under the pyramid in the fulcrum of the week - anytimeWednesday. Lucky dates: June 16, July 21, Aug. 30, Sep. 7, Oct. 21,Dec. 2 Lucky numbers: 30, 1, 12, 46, 35, 19

Aquarius: Be a bearer of good tidings. Carry your ticket near your heart and place it under the pyramid 12 hours from the drawing. Lucky dates: May 12, June 9, Aug. 20, Oct. 11, Nov. 17, Dec. 25  Lucky numbers: 46, 31, 6, 11, 23, 30

Earth

Taurus: To make Lady Luck bullish on you, wrap the ticket in bright red, then cover the parcel with the pyramid during daylight only. Lucky dates: June 9 and 11, Aug. 30, Sep. 9. Nov. 19, Dec. 22.  Lucky numbers: 7, 21, 4, 30, 11, 39

Virgo: Have a female relative or close female friend - the older the better-  slip the ticket under the pyramid. Lucky dates: June 5 and 12, July 18, Oct. 14, Nov. 15 and 17. Lucky numbers: 20, 33, 14, 40, 21, 8.

Capricorn: To have a goats of a chance, place the pyramid over the ticket with the Earth-sign side facing north. Lucky dates: June 11, Aug. 8, Sept. 9, Nov. 12, Dec. 22 and 25. Lucky numbers: 6, 21, 7, 33, 22, 30.

Aries: followers of the warrior sign prefer to attack at dawn....So that's when your ticket should invade your pyramid. Lucky dates: June 18, july 10. Sept. 27, Oct. 7 and 9, Nov. 19. Lucky numbers: 8, 9, 1, 26, 41, 43.

Leo: Show courage and give up a vice for good vibes beofre putting the ticket under the pyramid. Lucky dates: June 28, Aug. 29, Sept. 15, Nov. 30, Dec. 20 and 21. Lucky numbers: 5, 8, 11, 15, 44, 12

Sagittarius: Draw concentric circles on paper, put the ticket at the center, and cover with the pyramid. Lucky dates: June 17 & 20, July 11, Oct. 18, Nov. 13, Dec. 15. Lucky numbers: 23, 14, 16, 17, 43, 33.

Water

Pisces: Cover the ticket with the pyramid and place near water to absorb the source of all water signs' power. Lucky dates: June 8 and 15, July 17, Aug. 29, Sept. 23, Dec. 26. Lucky numbers: 31, 4, 11, 40, 44, 3.

Cancer: Use two clothespins to attach a dollar bill to the ticket and place them under the pyramid. Lucky dates: June 17, July 9, Aug. 5, sept. 24, Oct. 19 and 26. Lucky numbers: 36, 23, 14, 1, 5, 8.

Scorpio: Place the ace of diamonds over the ticket and cover with the pyramid. Lucky dates: June 3 and 10, July 4, Sept. 12, Nov. 7, and Dec. 4. Lucky numbers: 8, 10, 35, 19, 3, 7.

Good luck everyone.

Can't be true
According to a May report by Seattle's KOMO-TV, formerOregon National Guardsman Gary Pfeider II is awaiting the results ofhis latest appeal to end the garnishment of his disability checks tocover $3,175 for gear he "lost" when he was shot in Iraq. Pfeider washit in the leg by a sniper in 2007, bled profusely, and was evacuated (and is awaiting his ninth surgery on the leg), but the Oregon Guardapparently believes that, despite his trauma, Pfeider somehow shouldhave paused to inventory the equipment he was carrying and to makearrangements fir its safekeeping during his imminent hospitalization.

Sucker nation
TheNew Living Expo in San Francisco in May showcased such "healthy-living"breakthroughs as a $1,200 machine promising to suck toxins out of yourbody; a $249 silver amulet to protect you from "deadly" cell phoneradiation; and a $15,000 Turbo Sonic if your red blood cells need to be"de-clumped." A Canadian study at the same time found that 97 per centof the people who admitted buying "anti-aging" products did not thinkthey would work but nevertheless confessed their need to hope likethose who "hope" the viper-venom derived $525 Euoko Y-30 Intense LiftConcentrate will prolong their lives.

////////////////////////////

Hmmm:

A Canadian study at the same time found that 97 per centof the people who admitted buying "anti-aging" products did not thinkthey would work but nevertheless confessed their need to hope likethose who "hope" the viper-venom derived $525 Euoko Y-30 Intense LiftConcentrate will prolong their lives.

Wonder if lottery system buyers are the same breed.

For some laughs go to www.kissthisguy.com

Here's a few samples:

Piece of My Heart:
THE MISHEARD:
You're out on the street, lookin' good
In your BVD's now.

You're So Vain
THE MISHEARD:
I had some creams and there's ants in pantry!
Ants in the pantry!

Angel of the Morning
THE MISHEARD:
Just call me angel of the morning, angel
Just brush your teeth before you leave me

Be My Baby
THE MISHEARD:
The night we met I knew I...needed to sew.

The late Vernon Howard was quite a character. If you do a search for him on the net you'll find an interesting story.

This is one of his lessons:

"GROCERIES

'I would like to attend your class.'

'We meet Saturday at ten in the morning.'

'I usually shop for groceries on Saturday morning, but maybe
I can make it.'

'You won't make it.'

"How do you know?'

'You have just told me what you really value.'"

There is a Way Out, p. 71

Loyalty Day

Loyalty Day originally began as "Americanization Day" in 1921 as a counter to the Communists' May 1 celebration of theRussian Revolution. On May 1, 1930, 10,000 VFW members staged a rallyat New York's Union Square to promote patriotism. Through a resolutionadopted in 1949, May 1 evolved into Loyalty Day. Observances began in1950 on April 28 and climaxed May 1 when more than five million people across the nation held rallies. In New York City, more than 100,000 people rallied for America. In 1958 Congress enacted Public Law 529 proclaiming Loyalty Day a permanent fixture on the nation's calendar.

http://www.vfw.org/index.cfm?fa=cmty.leveld&did=2484

Giant Pez dispensers!

How Privacy Vanishes Online
By STEVE LOHR
Published: March 16, 2010

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?

Probably not.

Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.

Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.

“Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,” said Maneesha Mithal,associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division.“You can find out who an individual is without it.”

In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male.

So far, thi stype of powerful data mining, which relies on sophisticated statistical correlations, is mostly in the realm of university researchers, not identity thieves and marketers.

But the F.T.C. is worried tha trules to protect privacy have not kept up with technology. The agency is convening on Wednesday the third of three workshops on the issue.

Its concerns are hardly far-fetched. Last fall, Netflix awarded $1 million to a team of statisticians and computer scientists who won a three-year contest to analyze the movie rental history of 500,000 subscribers and improve the predictive accuracy of Netflix’s recommendation software by at least 10 percent.

On Friday, Netflix said that it was shelving plans for a second contest — bowing to privacy concerns raised by the F.T.C. and a private litigant. In 2008, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the customer data released for tha tfirst contest, despite being stripped of names and other direct identifying information, could often be “de-anonymized” by statistically analyzing an individual’s distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations.

In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual’s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.

You may no tdisclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender,location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T.“In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only moreso: people really can judge you by your friends.”

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say.

The power of computers to identify people from social patterns alone was demonstrated last year in a study by the same pair of researchers that cracked Netflix’s anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Narayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University.

By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharingservice, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.

“When you link these large data sets together, a small slice of our behavior and the structure of our social networks can be identifying,” Mr. Shmatikov said.

Even more unnerving to privacy advocates is the work of two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. In a paper published last year, Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross reported that they could accurately predict the full, nine-digit Social Security numbers for 8.5percent of the people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003 —nearly five million individuals.

Social Security numbers are prized by identity thieves because they are used both as identifiersand to authenticate banking, credit card and other transactions.

TheCarnegie Mellon researchers used publicly available information from many sources, including profiles on social networks, to narrow their search for two pieces of data crucial to identifying people —birthdates and city or state of birth.

That helped them figure out the first three digits of each Social Security number, which thegovernment had assigned by location. The remaining six digits had been assigned through methods the government didn’t disclose, although theywere related to when the person applied for the number. The researchers used projections about those applications as well as other public data, like the Social Security numbers of dead people, and then ran repeated cycles of statistical correlation and inference to partly re-engineer the government’s number-assignment system.

To be sure, the workby Mr. Acquisti and Mr. Gross suggests a potential, not actual, risk.But unpublished research by them explores how criminals could usesimilar techniques for large-scale identity-theft schemes.

More generally, privacy advocates worry that the new frontiers of data collection, brokering and mining, are largely unregulated. They fear “online redlining,” where products and services are offered to some consumers and not others based on statistical inferences and predictions about individuals and their behavior.

The F.T.C. and Congress are weighing steps like tighter industry requirements and the creation of a “do not track” list, similar to the federal “do not call”list, to stop online monitoring.

But Jon Kleinberg, a professorof computer science at Cornell University who studies social networks, is skeptical that rules will have much impact. His advice: “When you’re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you’re doing it in public —because increasingly, it is.”
A version of this article appeared in print on March 17, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/technolo...l?th&emc=th

This guy is good. Here's a glimpse of life in Vegas.

What happens here, stays here

by CHIP MOSHER

Grandmothersfrom Cleveland, plied with alcohol, lose their life savings at slotmachines. Casino owners, like pack rats, hoard the money, refusing topay their fair share in taxes to support the city's infrastructure ofhumanity. This, the infectious greed of a gambling culture. And whathappens here stays here.

Impoverished cancer patients deniedlife-saving treatments at a community hospital. A hundred citizensallegedly infected with hepatitis during routine exams bypenny-pinching doctors. An uninsured, sick, expectant mother notallowed proper emergency room protocol, and her unborn baby dies.Thousands of homeless children on the streets, turning to drugs andturning tricks to turn to drugs while looking for love in all the wrongfaces of pimps and pushers. Sex is the entry-level currency of agambling culture. And somewhere a casino mogul reportedly is paying arecord price, $33 million, for a Rembrandt painting for his elitist artcollection. What happens here stays here.

Dead bodieseverywhere. Like a war zone. Murders. Suicides. Tourists on the NevadaHealth Plan -- beer in one hand, cigarette butt in mouth while playinga slot machine -- their corpses ending up on casino floors from heartattacks. Unlucky babies tossed into Dumpsters. Gang violence. Caraccidents at every major intersection. Driving and talking on a cellphone is equivalent to driving while intoxicated, but in Vegas, 24-hourdrunks infest the roads while talking on cell phones. Trips to grocerystores become Death Race 2010. Blood flows more than rain in stormdrains. Vegas is not civilization, but rather an ultra-violent pretenseof civilization; a systematic scourging of mankind's better instincts;a modern-day Inquisition of the human heart, where heretics aresilenced, and all citizens must bow down to suckle on the theology ofthe slot machine teat. Human life has no value. As what happens herestays here.

Many pet owners have lost their paychecks betting onfootball and can no longer afford pet food. Thousands of dogs and cats,dumped in the desert, end up euthanized at animal shelters. Neglectedchildren at home wonder what happened to the family puppy, Muffy. Agambling culture ruthlessly strip-mines the human soul until nothing isleft. But what happens here stays here.

Careers of superstarshave gotten flushed down toilets of trouble because ethical entropy hasreduced the Las Vegas Strip from America's playground into adilapidated whorehouse spreading the insidious HAV (human avaricevirus). There is something rotten with the state of this gamblingculture. In the sewers underneath the city, the <snip> of ourshort-sightedness stays here.

To promote an appearance ofStepford-like civility, bright shiny new schools sit across streetsfrom the bright shiny religious temples that grow rich in this gamingMecca. But behind the impressive architectural facades of schools,terror lurks. Students and teachers pass through the education systemlike prodded cattle on their way to slaughterhouses. Many disappearovernight, in despair, never heard from again. The bottom line to thecasinos' greed is a school district based upon education in ruralMississippi in the 1930s. With the lowest per-pupil funding in thenation, Vegas's children are second-class citizens. Many students havebeen "resegregated," by color and economic class, into ghetto-izedschools. One former district superintendent proudly proclaimed:"Niggers come in all colors." And powerful casino owners, through theirpuppets in the state Legislature and on the local school board, havepromoted that superintendent's philosophy -- by treating teachers assuch, in both pay and the slave master tactics of fear. Publiceducation has no place in a gambling culture. True learning, in aSocratic sense, might shed too much light on the darkness beneath theslot machine theology. Yeah, gaming moguls very much want whateverhappens here to stay here. And somewhere Rembrandt must be weeping.

Chip Mosher is a simple classroom teacher.

http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2010/02/04/opinion/socrates_in_sodom/iq_34093036.txt

EARTH:

TAURUS:

To make Lady Luck bullish in you, wrap the ticket in bright red,then cover the parcel with the pyramid during daylight only.Luckydates: May 8 and 10. Lucky numbers: 8  22  5  31  12  40.

VIRGO:

Have a female relative or close female friend - the older thebetter- slip the ticket under the pyramid. Lucky dates: May 10,July 23,Oct 9, Nov 10 and 24. Lucky numbers: 15  38  9  45  26  3

CAPRICORN:

To have a 'goats' of a chance, place the pyramid over the ticketwith the Earth-sign side facing north. Lucky dates: June 13, Aug 2,Sept 9,Nov 19, Dec 17 and 19. Lucky numbers: 4  26  6  40  43  10.

AIR

GEMINI:

Even numbers harmonize fate's vibrations. Buy two lottery ticketswith the same numbers and keep both under the pyramid for twin power.Lucky dates: June 8, Aug 8 and 24, Oct 10, Dec 8 and 12. Lucky numbers:12  17  38  42  3  26.

LIBRA:

Balance in all things is the key. Place your ticket under thepyramid in the fulcrum of the week - anytime Wednesday. Lucky dates:May 10, Jul 27, Aug 23, Sept 1, Oct 27, Dec 8. Lucky numbers: 23  7 18  40  41  13

AQUARIUS:

Be a bearer of good tidings. Carry your ticket near your heart andplace it under the pyramid 12 hours from the drawing. Lucky dates:May 14, June 8, Aug 21, Oct 12, Nov 16, Dec 26. Lucky numbers: 47  30 7  10  24  19

WATER:

PISCES:

Cover the ticket with the pyramid and place near water to absorbenergy from the source of all water signs' power. Lucky dates: June 6and 13, Jul 11, Aug 27, Sept 25, Dec 21. Lucky numbers: 29  2  9  38 42  1

CANCER:

Use two clothespins to attach a dollar bill to the ticket and placethem under the pyramid. Lucky dates: May 13, Jul 6, Aug 1, Sept 15,Oct 20 and 27. Lucky numbers: 40  27  16  4  9  12

SCORPIO:

Place the ace of diamonds over the ticket and cover with thepyramid. Lucky dates: May 8 and 14, July 9, Sept 17, Nov 12, Dec 9.Lucky numbers: 9  11 36  20  4  9

FIRE:

ARIES:

Followers of the warrior sign prefer to attack at dawn. So that'swhen your ticket should invade the pyramid. Lucky dates: May 12, Jul 7,Sept 21, Oct 1 and 3, Nov 13. Lucky numbers: 2  6  9  20  35  37

LEO:

Show courage and give up a vice for good vibes before putting theticket under the pyramid. Lucky dates: May 26, Aug 27, Sept 13, Nov 28Dec 18 and 19. Lucky numbers: 25  36  3  41  9  18

SAGITTARIUS:

Draw concentric circles on paper, put the ticket at the center, andcover with the pyramid. Lucky dates: May 30, June 27, July 14, Oct 28,Nov 23, Dec 25. Lucky numbers: 13  4  6  7  33  43

WISHING ON A STAR REALLY WORKS

Posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
By Maleeka Spriggs

MELBOURNE – Your dreams are 46.5 percent more likely to come true if you gaze into the heavens – and wish for them on a star!

That’s the word from probability expert Kenyon Smith, who conducteda five-year study of adult men and women and found that those whowished for things “on stars” were much more apt to report that theirdreams had, in fact, come true.

“This is highly significant,” said the Melbourne, Australia-based expert, whose exciting new book, When We Wish, is slated for a fall release.

“For one thing, it suggests that the probability of somethinghappening can be influenced by thought and desire and possibly evensupernatural intervention in human affairs.

“The implications are fascinating. But for the layman, it’s probablyenough to know that wishing on stars can increase your chances ofhaving a dream come true,” said Smith.

Smith decided to study the effects of wishing on stars after his 4-year-old daughter asked if the kiddie rhyme Star Light, Star Bright, which suggests that wishing on a star will make your dreams come true, was based in fact.

On a whim, he undertook the study. And he quickly found evidence to suggest that wishing on stars “is a smart thing to do.”

“I decided to keep the study going and as time went on, the validity of the rhyme became more and more evident,” said Smith.

“As a matter of coincidence, you would expect about 4 percent of people to realize their dreams after wishing on stars.

“But 46.5 percent goes way beyond chance. Clearly, there is a directlink between the way we wish and the chances that our wish will becomereality.

“My study will continue,” he added. “Meanwhile, I strongly advisepeople to wish on stars if they really want their dreams to come true.You really have nothing to lose.”

According to Smith, most people who wish on stars follow these basicrules: “They make their wish silently on the first star they see atnight,” he said. “And they don’t tell anyone what their wish was. Theykeep it to themselves.”

http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/15347/wishing-on-a-star-really-works/

Virtual Coin Toss Lets Football Fans Watch The Flip

January 10, 2010

For decades, the coin toss at the start of every football game has been obscured from fans' view.

Inventor Dan LaRue was fed up.

"We'reseeing six little people, very far away, doing something in the centerof the field, and we can hear the ref talking about it, but we cannotsee it," he says.

So he decided to take action. He invented a system called eCoinToss.

Itconsists of a special coin embedded with technology similar to what'sinside a Nintendo Wii controller. The chip wirelessly transmits dataabout the coin's position to a computer. The computer synchronizes thisdata with a virtual coin displayed on the stadium's JumboTron.

Theresult: Fans can watch the coin flip through the air live, as ithappens, and even see the outcome of the toss before the ref does.

"Thisis a great way to take those 30 seconds of time that we can'texperience very well, and give the audience something very clear up onthe JumboTron," LaRue says.

Steve Ehrhart, director of theLiberty Bowl, helped give the eCoinToss its big break in 2009, andbrought it back again for this year's game.

"In the age oftechnology, we're always looking for a better way to do things,"Ehrhart says. "I hope it spreads. It was a very effective way ofgetting the 62,000 fans who were in the Liberty Bowl stadium there toparticipate in the coin toss."

Watch How It Works

This promotional video from eCoinToss.com shows their virtual coin in action.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122398194&ft=1&f=1001

Here's the results for 2008, 2009, and combined:

These were the 2008 results:

146 Jackpots

120 QP   82.19%

91 PS      62.32%

(includes shared jackpots)

2008 was a leap year. So in 366 days jackpots were paid out 146 times or every 2.506 days

82.19% of the jackpot winners were QP

62.32% were player's selections, or PS

2009

365 drawings, 157 jackpots, a hit every 2.32 days.

To date:

157 Jackpots

132 QP   84.07%

87 PS      55.41%

Total jackpot money paid out to date: $33,295,000

Two years combined

731 drawings

303 Jackpots

252 QP  83.16%

178 PS   58.74%

Anyone who insists that quick picks don't hit as often as player's picks needs to pick a game and track it. 

I think two years worth of results is pretty conclusive.

Anyone who wants the results daily can go to the Illinois Lotterywebsite and subscribe to an e-mail for them and have them sent, or justget them on the website every night.

Buono Fortuna.

Dec 23, Happy Festivus everyone!