iPhone Blower – Candles

Technology does spoil the fun of candles. Still a cool idea though.

[via Mashable]

The Birthday Paradox

The most intuitive way to describe the data mining problem to a non-statistician is through what is called teh birthday paradox, though it is not really a paradox, simply a perceptional oddity. If you meet someone randomly, there is a one in 365.25 chance of you sharing their birthday, and a considerably smaller one of having the exact birthday of the same year. So, sharing the same birthday would be coincidental event that you would discuss at the dinner table. Now let us look at a situation where there are 23 people in a room. What is the chance of there being 2 people with the same birthday? About 50%. For we are not specifying which people need to share a birthday; any pair works.

Now 50% is really high chance! Bet you never thought of that. Well, you could read more at Wikipedia for the exact math of The Birthday Problem or the Birthday Attack.

More madness and fun coming year. Better economy too. Our politicians always say things are getting better we just have to tighten our belts. Very tight liao loh.

“Really don’t want cake?”

“NO!”

Alright. Also on the good list is Anne-marie whom I am set to bump into once every week. Anne-marie says the most interesting things when she’s frustrated.

Happy birthday to both of them.

It was a poker plus beer plus Wii night. Wii had fun. Telok Blangah Heights is quite hard to find. Ridz and I jaywalk almost everywhere. I figured you can’t really go anywhere without jaywalking and the authorities kindly cemented parts of the ground to let jaywalkers have an easier time anyway.

I had Bavaria. I know nothing about beer except it makes my face red.

And Arzhou’s Arweiser is there too.

I watched them play poker. Roughly get the game but didn’t play it. I am not confident with playing cards. Spend most of my time watching the psychology part of the game which is just as interesting.

Wii are an interesting machine, takes a little while to get the hang of it. I hold the Wii controller like its a TV remote and wave it like Harry Potter. Also spent 20 minutes trying to figure out the Japanese words on the Wii when attempting to load a game. After 20 minutes, Hendri and I confirmed that we’re doing it totally wrong and we spend the past 20 minutes creating a new Wii profile.

On a side note, Wii Sports seems a bit more fun. There’s birthday cake too. It’s Uzyn and Ridz birthday on May 30. They’re (business) partners.

The whole event ended at around 4 plus. I got home at 5. My sleep cycle is so screwed now.

Ridz is into some web cam thing these days, he has quite a following when he points the camera to Uzyn while working. Here’s DK setting up the web cam to show everyone they can’t have the pizza we’re eating:

Maybe a blogger’s dream come true. Even parties are streamed live to the web. Yeah, we had Hawaiian pizza. By the way, most Singaporeans only heard 2 things about Hawaii, they’re a nice island and they have pizza.

It’s a potluck, I brought (or bought) chicken nuggets. The food is good, unfortunately we can’t finish them. Here’s the cake, badly mutilated with candles:

The cake is really good by the way. We talk about food, erm politics and image processing. Shared YouTube videos too. Happy birthday Ridzuan! This party, there’s around 12 people. Additionally, three laptops came anyway. By the way, it’s Uzyn’s birthday too. Happy birthday Uzyn!