She just said to me:

“You look nice. You normally look nice, but today you’re a standard deviation above the mean. By your standard, I mean.”

Isn’t she awesome?

So Kath wrote about playing the lotto, and why she does it. I started to write a reply which turned out to be insanely long, so long that it deserves republishing here.

I’ve never understood why people seem to get a thrill from buying a lotto ticket and imagining what they will do if they win. See, the thing is, imagination is free. You don’t actually need to buy the ticket to indulge in the “what would I do if I won lotto” game.

You could imagine that you found a ticket. You could imagine that some mysterious distant relative you’ve never heard of has carked it and you’ve inherited their estate. You could imagine charlie and the chocolate factory is real, and you’ve just laid your hands on the golden ticket.

None of this costs you anything.

And obviously you know how improbable it is to win, but you convince yourself otherwise. So quoting numbers isn’t going to win you over, but maybe visualizing it will. So here goes…

Google tells me the odds of winning oz lotto are 8,145,060 to 1. Let’s imagine these odds on a roulette table.

Let’s assume our roulette ball is 1cm wide. So it needs to fall into a slot that is at least 1cm wide. And there needs to be 8,145,060 slots. So that makes a roulette wheel with a circumference of at least 81 km. The good ol’ 2 pi R formula tells us that would make the wheel about 26km across.

This is way bigger than the biggest circular thing I can think of, the Arecibo radio observatory. Take a look at this picture of it.

Imagine playing roulette on that baby, hoping your ball will fall into the 1cm wide slot on the edge with your number on it.

That radio telescope is only 305 metres wide. The imaginary “lotto” roulette wheel is 26km wide; 86 times bigger! It might take you an hour of driving around it just to see who won, if you were doing 80km/hr! Assuming you can even spot a 1cm wide roulette ball at that speed!

Wow it was fun working that out and imagining it. And it cost me nothing! In conclusion, I am a total nerd and you should not buy lotto tickets.

You arrive home, rush to the toilet and are faced with this:

Do you:

a) flush, then piss
b) piss, then flush
c) grab the camera

?

No points for guessing which one I went with.

Dresden Codak is the best thing ever. That is all.

Xenophon got up in the Australian Senate yesterday and talked about the government’s proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS). Here’s what he said:

If we get this wrong, if the climate change sceptics are wrong, are they willing to literally bet the planet that they are right and thousands of climate change scientists are wrong? I think that is the key to this. My plea to Senator Joyce, whom I regard as a friend and colleague, is to look at the risk factors, look at this as an issue of managing risk. If you are doubtful about the science, at least look at the whole issue of managing this very significant risk, because there is no going back if we get this wrong.

Funny, I didn’t think Nick “no pokies” Xenophon was a gambling man? Either the science is valid, or it is not. Rhetoric and threats like this are useless, and should have no place in the senate. You could very well use the same argument to justify the doomsday crackpotism that is the 2012 mayan end of the world crap.

Unfortunately the evidence supporting climate change is valid, and we are all fucked unless we do something about it.

Still it would be nice if the senate was a forum of informed logical debate rather than a slanging match. Watching parliament question time will quickly shatter any such ideals. But if it is to be a primary school playground, at least Xenophon managed to get in this gem:

if the government’s CPRS were a dog, the only merciful thing to do would be to have it put down.

After new friends get to know me, one question is inevitable. “What kind of girls do you like?” I think I always get this question because I’m not very vocal about who I’m attracted to. I don’t wolf whistle or stare or proclaim “dayumn” every time someone I like walks by. Recently I was asked if I was gay by one of my new melbourne friends. The truth is I’m kind of shy and clueless when it comes to this stuff. I can’t flirt and I don’t even realise when someone is trying do so with me.

Anyway as a public service to clear up any confusion, here is a list of people I am attracted to. The catch? They are all fictional people from TV shows.

Liz Lemon

Daria Morgendorfer

Jane Lane

Samantha Carter

Codex

Seven of Nine

Willow Rosenberg

Tara

Faith

Hopefully that clears things up and wasn’t too creepy. Perhaps you could join in the weirdness by mentioning any fictional people you would “do” in the comments? No?

Recently I had to write a resume as part of a project review at work. In the template I was supplied with there was a section for “awards”. Not having won much official recognition, I did what all great resume writers do, and invented some.

Daniel Kinsman has won the following awards:

• 2005 Office guitar hero championship
• 2083 Time traveler of the year award

I was particularly proud of the last one. My manager, though sharing the humour, sadly told me to revise it.

So, can you come up with any humorous awards?

So I thought I’d give this video blog thing a go.

Yes, I realise that I’m giving him the publicity he wants, but I just couldn’t resist making fun of him. Oh, and here’s that post on Pascal’s wager I talk about in the video.

Kids are awesome. Recently I visited a primary school as part of the scientists in schools program. I was there to tell them all about space and the solar system – which is not my professional area of expertise, but let’s face it, I am a total space nerd. As they all came trundling in I was a bit nervous, having never dealt with such a large group of children before. Almost immediately they began asking questions.

“Have you ever done any experiments in space?”
“Have you ever met Neil Armstrong?”
“I heard that Venus is hotter than Mercury, why is that?”

I was blown away. Instead of being disinterested and bored they were absolutely brimming with curiosity before I had even begun to show them anything.

And then the presentation started. I had Celestia, a space simulation program in which you can see all of the planets and fly or zoom around them, up on a projector. First I showed them the sun, and they gasped at seeing what it looks like up close. I showed them the sunspots, I showed them mercury, the innermost planet, and proceeded to go through the planets and their moons one by one.

Celestia

Every sight was met with exclamations. “ooohhs” and “aahhhhhs” and “wooooaahhhhs”. The kids were so vocal, so uninhibited with their reactions that it filled me with awe. Somewhere along the way most of us adults lose that, which is a shame. I was reminded of my recent visit to the Australian Synchrotron, which awestruck myself and the other members of the tour. Yet awestruck as we were, there were very few audible exclamations from us. I didn’t exclaim when I learnt that the electrons are sped up to 99.99% the speed of light in only the first few metres, and the whole rest of the accelerator is just for pouring more energy into them, causing them to gain mass instead. I didn’t exclaim when I learnt that the whole floor we stood on floated in isolation from the rest of the building, to prevent minute vibrations from affecting the experiment. I did exclaim when I learnt that they have a computer system set up that is so fast it can react to changes in the electron beam before it comes around again for another circuit. Thankfully I haven’t lost all of my childhood wonder!

After the first ten minutes of talking with the kids I was getting overwhelmed with questions, so I had to press on and save them for the end, which was difficult. At times the class got so noisy their teacher had to interject to calm them down, but they weren’t being noisy because they were misbehaving, they were being noisy because they were interested and excited.

I did get a little worried after a question on supernovae, when a girl in the front row asked if our sun could ever explode. I said that it might be possible (though now I realize I was wrong about that), and the look of horror and fear that crossed her face really upset me. She seemed a little comforted by my quick assertion that it wouldn’t happen for billions of years, but I worry that I gave her nightmares. Still, it could have been worse, I actually considered telling her that she would be dead long before the sun would become a problem. Thankfully I thought better of it before opening my mouth!

Eventually we got all the way to Pluto (which they were especially interested in due to it’s demotion from planetary status) and had a little time left over. The kids were full of curiosity and some even managed to stump me with their insightful questions, which shows how intelligent they were. The whole experience was really rewarding, and I can’t wait to go back next term.