October can't come soon enough... (contains a high geekiness rating)

I'm a sad pathetic nerd with no life who likes to sit and blog about computer games when he's not playing them. Now I've said that, there is no need for you to do so.

Anyway, I like October, of all the months I hold it in highest regard after December. The weather's not too bad, and when you're at school, you get a half day and a week off at the end. Of course, there are other reasons too.

In the old days, Championship Manager (RIP) would always release a new incarnation in October. Then I discovered PES and the last friday in October was always a date to remember (and it still is). But this year, the new Half Life game is being released (as well as the new PES). The thought of two great releases in the same month is enough to make you giddy (in the highly unlikely event they release Gran Turismo 5 the same month, you might well count yourself lucky if you see me before Christmas), but before I get my crowbar and biohazard suit and queue up outside GAME like some Harry Potter loser at Waterstones (NB the adults who aren't parents who dress up are losers, not the people who read it), I have to make sure of the date. Unfortunately, Amazon, Play, Gameplay and GAME are telling me four different dates (5,12,19 and 26 respectively). Can anyone shed any light on this?

Whenever it is though, it will be epic...

Now, back to playing PES. Don't disturb me til September ends.

Sock dilemma

So... in BHS today, I was looking for socks because the sock fairy is stealing them all. I went to the menswear section and was pleased to find some very cheap socks.

However, as I was picking them up, I noticed that they said "World's Greatest Dad". I didn't buy them in the end because I espied some cheaper ones that said "world's greatest PhD student" (not really, they were plain), but I was in a brief dilemma...

So.. my question is this. Are cheap socks worth giving misleading information over? Or am I just overanalysing this waaaay too much?
What if I had bought "World's greatest Husband?"

Maybe I think too much. Oh well. Tata.

So which Premier League team DO I support??

I've often been posed with this question, but have never given a satisfactory answer. So to clear it up, here's a breakdown of how I see the Premier League:

Teams I like:
Tottenham
Everton
Blackburn Rovers
Man Utd
Man City

Teams I am indifferent towards but like to see winning because it makes my friends happy:
Aston Villa
Newcastle

Teams I don't really care about but contain a lot of Northern Ireland players so it's nice to see them do well:
Fulham

Teams I am completely neutral towards:
Reading
Wigan
Birmingham
Derby
Middlesbrough
Portsmouth

Teams I don't really like for one reason or another but am not really all that bothered:
West Ham
Sunderland
Bolton
Arsenal

Teams I can't stand:
Chelsea
Liverpool

So there you go. So when you ask who I support, the answer is "no-one", but as you can see, that doesn't mean I can't have an opinion...

Story time...

Well, not yet. Literally ones of you have been captivated by my stories in the past. Notable stories include:

The JCMB coming to life (this was dreadful and I am so thoroughly ashamed of it, no copies exist anywhere)

A man who falls in love with someone he's never met (which still exists... somewhere), a 10 part story whose premise is fully explained already

Fright of the Navidator: a parody of "flight of the navigator" starring Alice and Bob, which hangs around my hard drive

Bob, Actually: A valentine's day take on Dickens's classic "A Christmas Carol" which I think is still on my facebook

Well, this is just a preliminary post to tell you another one is in the pipeline, and I can exclusively reveal that it will not star Alice and Bob, and will be based on a song by Green Day. I won't say which one, but I will reveal it's not one of the sweary ones. So, be indifferent. Be very indifferent...

Lewis Hamilton, F1 champion! Hang on...

I've always had issues with British sports commentators (NB NOT the fans) as a whole. There's a lot of arrogance and presumption involved as well as (often) a lack of respect for "Johnny Foreigner". But anyway, this really, really takes the biscuit.

There's a forthcoming biography of Lewis Hamilton. I was directed to it on amazon today and was amused to find the following synopsis:

"
This is the story of the boy who proves fairytales do come true. The boy who grew up on a council estate, who, at the tender age of 22, came through against all the odds to dominate and revolutionise the world of motor racing.Thrown in at the deep end 'on a mighty whim' by F1 team owner Ron Dennis, Lewis Hamilton crowned his 2007 debut season by winning the title in Japan in October - and was in the running for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year 2007. It was an outcome no one seriously could have predicted: not only did he have to combat his own nerves and fears; he had to overcome a dissenter within his own camp.With behind-the-scenes insight into the intense rivalry between Hamilton and his team mate Fernando Alonso which threatened to derail the young Briton's dream, bestselling sports author Frank Worrall describes how the rookie rose above his critics, keeping his dignity and emerging triumphant as he racked up sensational wins around the world.But the boy-wonder's stellar rise through the motor racing ranks from karting to the hotly contested F3 Superprix and onto the F1 podium was by no means straightforward. Lewis' racing career began aged just six, when his father, h"

That it doesn't even finish the sentence is bad enough, but read it again and you will spot the line

"Thrown in at the deep end 'on a mighty whim' by F1 team owner Ron Dennis, Lewis Hamilton crowned his 2007 debut season by winning the title in Japan in October - and was in the running for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year 2007"

The Japanese Grand Prix is held on September 30th this year. The championship remains unresolved at this point, and it might not be won until Brazil in October. So something is a bit amiss.

You would think the publishers might act to prevent this kind of error...

You can find the link below:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lewis-Hamilton-Biography-Frank-Worrall
/dp/1844545431/ref=pd_rhf_p_1/202-6565797-4511001

Oh, and I'd really keep it quiet from a certain Senor Alonso....

The Stothman prophecies

(like the mothman prophecies, geddit? oh well never mind..)

Every I year I predict stuff that will happen in the football season (and usually get it wrong), so here is this term's selection:

Premiership: Man Utd to win; Wigan, Derby and Fulham to get relegated; Spurs to be dark horses and maybe pip Arsenal to the top four.

SPL: Celtic to win, Rangers to come second, Aberdeen to come third and Gretna to be relegated. Hearts finish in the bottom half having gone through 38 managers, one for each game of the SPL season. I end up as head coach, but get sacked because I haven't been to Lithuania.

Irish League (you knows it): Linfied to win, noone to understand what's going on with regards to relegeation..

FA Cup: Liverpool

Scottish Cup: Rangers

Champions League: I suspect it will go to England, but I don't wish to guess as to which club. Chelsea? Inter will get far, and Sevilla to be dangerous dark horses


UEFA Cup: Who knows? You don't know who's in it til December

Euro 2008: Will probably be rubbish, but I have an inkling that Germany could well return to their former glories. So they probably won't. England will just about qualify, but will lose to either Germany or Portugal on penalties. The media howls with injustice and the scapegoat this time is, oh I don't know, Michael Ballack. Northern Ireland probably don't qualify while Scotland fail to qualify as a result of a last minnute goal scored by Italy at Hampden.

So, watch the season unfold and see all of this not come true! I'd love to hear your predictions...

Of monkeys and typewriters

The concept of the monkeys and the typewriters is a famous one. If you have an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters, any work you care to mention (often cited as being the complete works of Shakespeare, you could also have all the Harry Potter books, my PhD thesis and your GCSE English coursework) will but spouted out. Well, supposedly anyway.

So why? The argument is that if you stick a monkey in front of a typewriter, it will either write a pointless blog whingeing about why it's okay for adults to like Harry Potter or it will start hitting keys at random (it is assumed the monkey doesn't run off or hide in Chris Griffin's closet) , thus we have a random variable. Now, supposing the complete works of Shakespeare contain k characters, there are 27^{k} possible combinations of letters plus the space bar (that is not including numbers, "tab" and other such keys), and so the probability that one monkey, after tapping k keys, has typed up shakespeare is < 1/(27)^k, which is very,very small. The point is though, that it's still more than 0, so it can happen. We call this probability p.

Now, the probability that the monkey will not type shakespeare is 1-p, which is less than 1. The probability that 2 monkeys don't type shakespeare is (1-p)^2 and so on. Thus, if M is some huge number, the probability that M monkeys don't type Shakespeare is (1-p)^M which, for large enough M, will be tiny, since (1-p)<1. style="font-style: italic;">almost surely.

Why almost surely? Surely 1 means that it is certain? No, sadly not, but it would make everyone's lives (well... my life) that bit easier. If something is certain, it will have probability 1 ( eg 2 is an even number), but if something has probability 1, it is not necessarily certain. Analogously, we say that something having probabilty 0 is not necessarily impossible.

An example then: it's easier to show that something of probability zero is not necessarily impossible, so I will do that.

Suppose I am throwing darts at a picture of JK Rowling on a dartboard. Now, there are an infinite number of points on the dartboard (don't believe me? try and count them), and we suppose that the dart lands anywhere in the dartboard. Where does the exact centre of the tip of the dart land? On any point, we assume with equal probabilty. Thus, the probability that it lands on any particular point is 1/infinity which is so ludicrously tiny that we define it to be zero. But the tip of the dart has to land somewhere.. So the probability of it landing in the exact centre is zero, but it is still possible... (and thus the probability that it will not land on a particular point is 1, but it can still land on it)

So what's the point of all this? Well, assuming I haven't confused you and you're still reading, the point here is that maths probably isn't as clear cut as you think it is, and that's why you get gibbons like me who decide they want to help advance it further. It's fascinating, is it not?

Andrew (aka Monkey 7854778434783274387547876947547033234...)

Addendum: I read this somewhere, lampooning wikipedia:

"The stuff about monkeys and typewriters is rubbish. If you have a million monkeys and a million typewriters, they can't even make an encyclopedia"