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Sunday, 23 August 2009 |
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 As we eat a fair few minties at work, i decided that we should be able to recreate the Minties cartoon sequence. It was a little more tricky than i first anticipated because after a short time i realised that although the same cartoons would appear, the adjacent cartoon would be different on some wrappers. I remember seeing a blog where someone else found the same thing and then threw the idea into the too hard basket.
Of coarse there must be an explanation. I toyed with the idea that there could be multiple rolls and that i would need to do a statistical analysis and calculate the probability of multiple rolls. I then had the idea that maybe there could be a single roll with duplicate cartoons and so i set to prove my single roll theory. If i could make a single chain out of the wrappers, that loops and uses all the cartoons then it would be true; else there would be cartoons left over proving there are multiple rolls.
I suspected that a tally of each cartoon sighting should be similar except for duplicates which should be seen more frequently. After making a successful sequence using all the cartoons, I tried taking a subset of the sequence to try and make more than one repeating sequence that includes all the cartoons and could not find a way.
I now conclude that there are 18 cartoons on the roll with the diagonal edge pattern. There are 3 duplicate cartoons which leaves 15 unique cartoons on the roll.
Update 17 Jan 2010: Barry Mitchell has challenged my single roll theory, calling it an 'Official Challenge'. In do so, he presented me with a solution using the same wrappers but splitting the sequence into two separate rolls. The solution looks to be valid to me and is more likely to be the real sequences since the horizontal pattern has two rolls as well.
I haven't scanned the horizontal wrappers yet. |
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Drive failure or smoke alarm |
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Sunday, 26 July 2009 |
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At 4.30am this morning I had a hard drive failure and awoke to the sound of an alarm. At first I thought it was a smoke alarm and so I got out of bed at the speed of light. As there is no console attached to my server I could not immediately deactivate the alarm without cutting the power, so that’s what I did.
Although I haven’t checked yet, I suspect it is my TV recording drive which gets pretty hammered. It is full most of the time and is defragged each night I think. In case you don’t know, defragging a near full drive thrashes it.
There will be no service held for the drive, however there will be an autopsy. The drive has kindly donated it’s organs (magnets) to our work white board.
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E10 vs Premium unleaded statistical analysis |
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Thursday, 23 October 2008 |
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Abstract - This study determines whether paying an average extra 10c per liter for premium fuel over E10 unleaded fuel results in a greater distance travelled per liter of fuel in a Ford AU series III sedan.
Introduction
Some cars are tuned to run better on high octane fuels and others make little difference. To establish whether a particular car travels further using a certain type of fuel we need to conduct an experiment. The aim is to discover whether the difference, if any, is worth the extra money we pay for the higher octane fuel. |
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Saturday, 28 May 2005 |
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This is my first attempt at stop-motion animation with the assistance of Damien and Quintin Kennedy animating each character. While browsing the internet in search of information on time-lapse photography i stumbled on the closely related topic of stop-motion animation. |
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2003 Annual Holiday Stats |
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Sunday, 01 February 2004 |
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Statistics are as follows: |
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