Minority Report / CSI style touch screen boards

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The New York branch of Mill has been working on their Mill Touch screen.

Check out their video here: http://www.themill.com/work/mill-touch/behind-the-scenes.aspx

 

From Mill: Remember the giant, interactive touch screen that detective John Anderton used to fight pre-crime in the movie, Minority Report?

Remember how crazy and far-fetched that concept seemed at the time? And that was only 2002! Fast forward to present-day, and you will find the new Mill Touch at the center at our Mill New York office.

Executed from concept to launch in-house by our NY Digitial team, it is a rear projected, 5×3 interactive touch screen panel made entirely of switchable glass.

Two Google cars chillin’

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Two Google Cars in one placeI was browsing a remote area of Alaska on street view called Deadhorse. I had a look at their airport, and noticed something interesting on street view.

Two Google cars were next to each other. Not only that – but if you press the arrows it switches you from one car to the other.

I guess the cars are in a really remote area, so they probably arranged transport from the airport? Anyway, check it out on the link below.

View the Street view here: maps.google.co.uk

Tottenham Riots

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Tottenham RiotsI was raised in Walthamstow, next door to Tottenham – which now looks like a warzone. It’s upsetting, as only a couple of years ago millions was invested in improving this area.

The world has suffered over 5 trillion dollars worth of losses on the stock markets over the last week. Unemployment is already high. But last night many thought it was clever to destroy the local businesses. Forcing large chains to shut up and destroying the lives of many small business owners. It will take some time for the local economy to recover.

I wonder how many of them will go to the job centre during the week for their welfare benefits because they “can’t find any jobs in the local area”.

Anyway, I found a set of photos on Flickr from ‘Beacon Radio’ that show the situation better than words can alone.

Photos by Beacon Radio: Beacon Radio on Flickr

GOW2EXP API

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So I’ve put together an API for GOW2EXP – mostly for a test, and also as I noticed a very small amount of people were using automated tools/scripts to read pages on gow2exp.
I don’t know why, but I thought it would be good to offer my calculator via an API to allow developers to build their own tools for Gears of War 2 rankings.

This has probably come out 2 years too late to be useful, but I needed some API practice!

Head over to http://api.gow2exp.com/ for the API documentation, examples and information.

GOW2EXP – SDCC Gears Weekend

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GOW2EXP TrafficMy Gears of War 2 Calculator has been going for two and a half years now, and always receives large traffic spikes during increased experience weekends – the SD Comic Con is no different.

 

Over quarter of a million
Since it’s creation (even with Joe Graf saying it was wrong at first), there’s been roughly 300,000 visitors. This means it’s not the most successful site of mine in terms of visitor counts – but it seems to have made the biggest impact/difference in the associated community.

Wings everywhere
I haven’t played gears since I took part in the Gears of War 3 beta a few months ago, so I decided I’d give it ago again. Pretty much every game had several players with their ‘wings’. Much different than when I was playing!

I was badly out of practice, but did have some fun. Although one game I picked up the Torque bow and, well, was pretty bad at it! A player on my team decided to shout and curse at me down his mic for the rest of the game. One thing stood out from the rest of the abuse: something along the lines of “DrMong u fking retard, I bet u dnt even kno how 2 play n just here 4 da 20x event, dickfuk”. In a way he was right – I only played because the event was on (and I hadn’t played in months). It would be very interesting for Epic to release how many more people play during an event compared to normal days.

Level 74
Going by the increase of traffic to GOW2EXP I’d imagine a lot of people play just for the events, I mean afterall, if you’re playing for your wings – playing on a non event weekend would be a waste of time! That 6.8 million experience points is just.. stupid. I gave up at level 74.

52 lottery tickets. My results.

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Lotto ResultsIn my previous post I mentioned buying 52 lottery tickets (random lucky dips) for fun and an experiment.

I had a 1 in 1.09 chance of matching 3, and winning £10. Which – I did. But that was it!

The numbers were 04, 09, 13, 15, 18, 40 (bonus 30)

I matched 1 number in 18 rows.
2 numbers in 6 rows.
3 numbers in 1 row.

Number variance was quite interesting. I matched the numbers as follows:
04 – six times
09 – six times
13 – five times
18 – five times
15 – three times
40 – nine times

From this experiment we can see the probability worked out. I had a very very good chance of winning £10, and I did.

However, when buying 52 tickets, there is a 1 in 19.85 chance of matching 4 balls this would roughly get you between £60 and £150. This means for a very good chance of matching 4 balls – you’d have to buy 20 times as many tickets, costing £1040.

Was a 1 in 1067 chance of matching 5 balls (a prize of £1500) really worth spending £52? No.

Lesson: you’re more likely to make money by putting your money in a bank or investing it.

 

A year of lottery… in one day

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LottoAfter losing £4 on two tickets for the Euromillions yesterday (where the Scottish couple became Europes biggest lottery winners) I decided to try an experiment.

I just bought 52 lines of the UK National Lottery. A bit mad perhaps? But it’s the same as playing once a week for a year (so I will not play again for a year). This is for a bit of fun, an experiment and an end to my lottery gambling. So I may as well increase my odds? In fact it will be very very unlikely that I don’t win at least some of my money back.

The stats:

3 numbers: 1 in 1.09
4 numbers: 1 in 19.85
5 numbers: 1 in 1067.14
6 numbers: 1 in 269,230.77

I will post how I get on!

 

Blog is back.

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After a year or so of no blog, I thought it was time to get going again.

With hundreds of visitors a day to my posts about the iCare motorbike and the Aston Martin 177, it was rather stupid to let it slip!

But now I’m starting again and hopefully will keep it alive better!