Category: bits and bytes

“I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol, and wild women.  The other half I wasted.” – WC Fields

Here is a visualization prepared by data scientist Seth Kadish.  The chart presents the house odds in gambling in Las Vegas casinos, the percent of wagered money won by the house against the total revenues for the week.  For example, if $100 is wagered on blackjack, the house will take 11%, or $11.  The data comes from reports published by the Nevada Gaming Control Board .

You should already know that the house always wins, or more precisely, the odds favor the house.  If it doesn’t, they unilaterally convict you of card counting and ban you from ever playing in the casino again.

The chart is hard to read here, so if you want to see the detail, go to Seth’s site.  The pithy summary is:

• sports parlay cards are the worst odds for the player, with the house taking nearly 40% of the amount of money wagered (upper left quadrant)
• 3-card poker is the worst card game, at about 33%
• roulette is about 18%
• craps is about 14%
• blackjack is about 11%
• your best odds is the $100 slot, at about 4%

This is not to condemn gambling, but it *is* a money pit.  Thanks for playing.

Here is an intriguing time-lapsed photo of the sun’s position in the sky over Wroclaw, Poland, taken three-times a day throughout one year:

Maciej Zapiór, a solar physicist at the University of the Balearic Islands in Palma, Majorca, and colleague Lukasz Fajfrowski built a pinhole camera and set it to make 1-minute-long exposures onto a single piece of photographic paper at 10:30, 12:00 and 13:30 each day from 1 March 2013 to 1 March 2014.  The resulting image shows how the position of the sun in the sky changes throughout the year.  In the summer it is higher, in the winter lower.  Its position also shifts horizontally, tracing a figure-of-eight path called an analemma.

see original article on New Scientist

These definitions seem to be attributed to Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense.  The attribution is usually derogatory, e.g. “Rumspeak”.  But I think its great …

Known knowns – things we know we know

Known unknowns – things we know we don’t know

Unknown unknowns – things we don’t know we don’t know

Rumsfeld would add another relevant, telling category later: the unknown known, the kind of thing you think you know, based on information that seems solid but which in reality isn’t very solid at all. It’s the thing you think you know but that you actually do not.

Here is a video of Rumsfeld describing his uncertainty principle.

A great photo of Manhattan post-Sandy from New York Magazine.  Most of Manhattan is in darkness, the eastern tip near Times Square is not.

Here is a photo of an unusual cloud formation shot in Birmingham, Alabama. Called a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, the formation is caused when the wind is moving at different speeds at different altitudes, creating a shearing effect and resulting in clouds shaped like slow-moving waves across the horizon.

And who’d a thunk it, but there is a website for the Cloud Appreciation Society, which has user contributed photos of clouds from around the world and beyond.

Here is a piece of metal sitting on a dandelion. It’s the world’s lightest material, developed by a team of researchers from the University of California at Irvine.  It comprises 99.99% air and is one hundred times lighter than Styrofoam.

Weird but amazing animal. Hagfish are partway between fish and worms, with a spinal cord but no backbone. They have changed little in at least 300 million years. Hagfish largely scavenge, but have recently been found to hunt as well. When they come across a big carcass, they burrow into it and then eat it from the inside. Uniquely for a vertebrate, in addition to having a gut, they can absorb nutrients through their skin and gills. But feeding inside a decaying corpse, there will be little oxygen in the water and lots of toxic ammonia from the rotting flesh. The hagfish can cope with these adverse conditions, no problem. For hunting and defense, hagfish release a slime that gums up the gills of its predetor or victim, which suffocates it.

I love dinosaurs.  There is something about animals that lived a hundred million years ago that fascinates me.

Archaeopteryx is an iconic prehistoric animal, living some 155 million years ago. It was long thought to be the first bird.  This new fossil, complete except for its head, is only the eleventh Archaeopteryx skeleton ever discovered. Like every other, it was found in Germany.  What amazing detail.  Beautiful.

German paleontologists have discovered what they believe is the best-preserved dinosaur skeleton ever found in Europe, with 98 percent of the fossil intact.  The 72 cm fossil dates to about 135 million year old.  This juvenile is in the same theropod family as T-rex, who lived 70 million years later.

Here are two images of the fantastic fossil.