adam @ 404

People of the Earth, you really aren’t cool.

Drinks in Amsterdam

I’ve gotten my Turkey trip photos uploaded to Flickr. Two weeks of traveling with Dad through Netherlands and Turkey, then another week on my own in Moldova and back to Istanbul again. There are close to 200 photos so it might take some time to look through all of them but I recommend using the photo album feature with caption info. Let me know what you think here or on Flickr!

I was searching on amazonmp3 for Econochrist songs, because everyone knows how much I love Econochrist, and I happened upon a multidisc album called Towncraft (Notes from a Local Scene) which looks like it has Soophie Nun Squad on the cover. It looks to be the soundtrack for a movie (likely about Little Rock AR), anyone heard of this? I’ll see what I find out.

Ed: Ope, here we are.

From the 2008-2009 New York State Senate Budget Report:
“The Senate rejects the Executive’s proposal to create a new tax on illegal drugs. ($13 million)”

If someone has figured out how to tax illegal substances, I, for one, would like to know this ingenious plan.

Also, “The Senate rejects the Executive’s proposal to increase the tax on flavored malt beverages. ($15 million)”

Close call! Mike’s Hard Lemonade prices would have skyrocketed and there goes my wine cooler weekends in NYC.

A comment posted by Daniel: “I couldn’t understand some parts of this article ‘07 Cooking Series: Get Your Hands Off My Tortilla, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.”

Robots are so cool like that.

This story comes from the hospital next door to my apartment. It’s the leading trauma and knife wound center in the Northwest. Lucky me.

…The Chapel of Love!

Well golly, this place looks different. 4 dudes of the 404 dot org are moving their stuff over to a new server so a few things on this blog will be missing for a few days.

I missed the Menomena show at UW that I bought tickets for. Completely forgot. Work is officially ruining my life.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to learn a card game well. Yesterday, I went down to the Central Library to find some books to read on card games. Looking through the Games section I found a book, “Slot Machine Strategy: Winning Methods for Hitting the Jackpot.” My first response was to laugh; I had to read this book.

It’s a quick read, written in an, at times, war story-like style by a “slot veteran.” Even after reading it, the skeptic in me thinks some casino owner union paid the author with the golden pseudonym, Macintyre Symms, to write a book to give people enthusiastic hope that there is actually a winning strategy to a game that is probabilistically stacked against them. The other part of me thinks that somewhere past the cheerleading (”be proud of slots”), annoying over-reliance on anecdotal evidence (especially in the case study section where someone is quoted as saying “slot machines are a lot like the stock market”), and seriously obvious common sense (e.g. don’t gamble on illegal machines or do illegal stuff) , there are some pretty keen tips and observations about the business of slot machines that build a general strategy of slot machines.

The number one reason I think the book is leading people astray is that it doesn’t reinforce the idea that in fact the odds are always against you when playing the slots. It’s truly a gamble and chances are you’re going to lose. If you want a better bet on earning money, go invest in bonds or mutual funds or better yet, work instead of going to the casino. It is mentioned in the book that casinos wouldn’t have slot machines if their aggregate returns didn’t turn a profit on total plays, but it isn’t stressed that every single machine (unit of gambling/dealer) on the floor is going to return a profit over time (even factoring in fixed-costs like the building and machine itself). No matter what machine you play, the odds are against you. Chances are going to be better on certain table games, and in some cases, they can actually be in your favor. But in those cases, the casino can rely on free alcohol, variable pacing, quick talking dealers, wait staff and other elements to serve as distractions to confuse and throw-off gamblers of these thinking games. There are relatively few of the same effective distractions in the “mindless” world of the slots.
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