Richard with new Nokia handsets. ooh er they are damn sexy!
〓Tracey〓

So this is where they end up? Laundromat in Sendagaya.
〓Tracey〓

Dinner with MJ and her in-laws. 5 people, 5 lobsters. YUM!
〓Tracey〓

Lamb roast with all the trimmings.
〓Tracey〓

Tokyo’s shock rocker extraordinaire has recently been spreading noxious germs memes batons, and kindly asked for my participation in the process.

Unfortunately, I will have to decline, seeing how:

1. I have already posted enough list/sample/endless ranting around the theme of music, digital version thereof included, to fill a few medium-sized encyclopedia. I am sure all the answers to the questionnaire are already there, in one form or another.
2. I like kittens.

However, not one to stay on a grumpy note, I went extra miles to participate in another of her cool ventures and add my contribution to her neat flickr group idea.

Yes, it’s a picture of myself. And I’m naked. So what? other people have done it before. There’s no shame.

What can I say, I was a sexy mutherfucka in my youth… Can you sense that raw sensuality oozing from my bare muscular buttocks?

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Snap taken of movie. Can you tell I enjoyed this movie? A fun night out in Tokyo town!
〓Tracey〓

Take Abe. Star of Bondi Tsunami. Met in person tonight. Very skinny and a stronger Aussie accent than me.
〓Tracey〓

Flick snaps.
〓Tracey〓

Australian-Japanese surfing road movie in FJ holden. What more can you ask for in a cult film?
〓Tracey〓

Movie screening. “Bondi Tsumami”. Check it out!
〓Tracey〓

Don’t mind the noise in the background: still a few Apple fanboys around the world finishing themselves with WWDC keynote reruns. Man, what a mess the conference hall floor must have been.

A few thoughts to dump on top of the 20 millions (conservative estimate) blatantly unqualified comments on Apple’s recent decision to stick it to IBM and go with Intel:

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I flipped a coin, and between blogging about health, cats or the Deeper Meaning of Life, the latter won.

Then I realized I had very little to say about the Deeper Meaning of Life tonight.

…

Health is good.

I’m told it’s a good sign that I have stopped spitting blood.

Damn, I meant to mention: if you are planing on reading, you may want to stop eating now. If you are planning on eating, you may want to stop reading now…

Of course, I’d appreciate this news even more, had it not been replaced by recurrent bouts of blood sneezing. It would appear that, despite near-seasonal-record temperatures registered all over Europe for the past two weeks, I have managed to catch, of all things, a cold.

I think I know exactly when I caught it. Right after my surgery. Not only were the conditions memorable, but they also featured some very strange insights in the utterly fucked-up way my poor excuse for a brain seems to work:

Dunno if that was due to the longer-than-expected duration of the surgery, but apparently, my post-op wake-up was a bit more shaky than should have been…

The usual procedure goes something like this:
1) open eyes 2) say “hello world” and give my bravest sickly-young-boy smile with a thumb up worthy of the most ridiculous afternoon soaps 3) feel intense pain in every parts of my body, barely mitigated by the horrible aftertaste of anesthetic in the back of my throat 4) give the International Sign Language version of “please more painkiller in my I.V. drip” 5) go back to sleep…

Instead, it went something like:
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[Blogger Advisory: unspeakable nerdery, use of foul language.]

As promised: the answer to yesterday’s riddle (I know, suspense is killing you)…

Upon closer inspection, maybe I went a bit ahead of myself when I postulated the solution was “really easy”. Note that the explanation below, while somewhat tedious and longwinded, should be perfectly intelligible to anybody with very basic notions of arithmetic and a few sober neurons. If you don’t fit either criteria, feel free to skip to the last paragraph.

The Question

Does one stand better chances of: 1) getting at least one ace with 6 throws of a die, or 2) getting at least two aces with 12 throws?

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In the spirit of sharing the pain and suffering, I figured I’d make an entry dedicated to the kind of stuff I currently spend my days doing. Well: apart from giving you gruesome details of my current state of health or finding new, inventive, ways to scratch my ass.

Yes, brace yourself, for today is about Mathematics. Physics may come in another post later this week.

Probabilities

Since, I’m confident none of you, the nerdiest included, really want to hear about quadratic integration and advanced set theory (basing this guess on the fact that I would myself be much happier not knowing anything of their existence), I’ll talk about the only mathematical field remotely interesting to the common: Probabilities.

Unfortunately, probabilities are a very minor part of my curriculum, in what is probably my personal gods’ way of telling me: “see that finger? well that’s all you get, so stick it wherever you see fit and don’t hope for anything better”.

Mathematics, past early college level are fairly useless. The farther away, the more completely, utterly, devoid of potential real-life applications they get. And I don’t mean merely for those who later go on working full-time as stunt doubles in the San Fernando valley: even advanced engineering hardly ever requires mathematical tools that go beyond a first or second year university program, the rest is all for the mere glory of it. That leaves you with research and teaching as the two only career somewhat approaching full use of the curriculum.

Since no institution sane in their mind would ever let me anywhere close to a research lab (least of all: pay me to do so), while the degree of contempt I hold for my fellow humans happens to peak around the age group that frequents universities, it is safe to assume that I won’t ever be needing most of the stuff I am currently expected to master.

Lost in this ocean of tediousness, the barren islands of semi-useful fun that are Probabilities and Game Theory are the most paradisiac coasts you’ll ever lay an eye on. They let you actually glimpse into real uses for some of the wildly abstract mathematical constructs you’ve been using for years… That’s pretty unheard of for a student of Mathematics…

Even if the gist of it is: you would have to be a complete moron to ever lay a chip in a Vegas casino and, in the long run, we are all dead. If you squint really hard, you could nearly imagine that hypothetical situation where an idealized version of yourself, self-assured and composed, would step forward amidst the panic-stricken crowd of your fellow plane-crash passengers, and proclaim loudly: “We may as well save ourself the jump in these shark-infested waters: our chances of survival regardless are below 1% with a 97.48% probability factor. I would know: I am a mathematician.”

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5 Scars, off the top of my head:

• age – body part – shape – tool used – location: comment
• Before 1 – upper-lip – all over – scalpel – some hospital: Don’t remember much of that one.
• 8 – lower belly – straight line, a good two inches long – scalpel – some other hospital: Dangerously closer to vital reproductive organs.
• 12 – left shoulder – kinda star-shaped, rather tiny – surfboard+wave+basaltic ocean ground – bottom of the Indian ocean: The wave didn’t look that big at the time. Volcanic stone will really rip your skin apart.
• 17 – left shoulder – neat incision, half-an-inch – girlfriend with a knife – Paris: Not nearly as bad as it sounds.
• 22 – knuckle on medium finger of right hand – crescent-shaped – blunt object held by Bad Guy – Tokyo: more blood than damage. Didn’t end up all that well for Bad Guy.

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