Many things we affirm and deny, because the nature of worlds allows us to do so, though the nature of things does not. While we remain unaware of this fact, we may easily mistake falsehood for truth. Benedict de Spinoza, Of the Improvement Of The Understanding.
It was not what Nigel Wright said today down at the Elgin Street courthouse here in Ottawa that was shocking. It was the way he looked, that floored the Oracle of Ottawa. The man has gone completely grey in about a year, and the major bald spots cannot be hidden. For someone that has nothing to worry about it sure is weird.
Nigel S. Wright - Before Duffy
It must have been tough to be the Goyim Sweet Jesus of M&A on Bay Street and give all that up to help pilot the 'Harper Government' evil empire. Sort of like Mother Theresa leaving Calcutta to join the CIA to do water boarding at an undisclosed location. When you are fortunate enough to be head and shoulders above all that surround you, you really should be more careful who you decide to hang out with.
Nigel S. Wright - After Duffy....
Meanwhile the Oracle of Ottawa was also very struck by the appearance of Senator Mike Duffy as he arrived to court today. He looked the picture of health, all radiant and blooming, there does not seem to be much weighing upon him as he looks forward to the cross examination.
It is all very strange if you read Nigels biography on Wikipedia, that just happens to be fully cited, and of which I have provided a link to. Much to the Oracle of Ottawa's surprise the brilliant Nigel was not born with the silver spoon in his mouth. He was adopted? I damn near fell over. He was a love child and of no ordinary genetic stock. Again gaze upon the "before " picture and note the bearing and posture. The Oracle of Ottawa was struck by a theory of such explosive immensity that not even the Oracle of Ottawa will dare to touch... And so it goes on Day Eleven of the Canadian 2015 General Election.
I hope that the essay will be useful for some, while harmful to none, and that my openness will be to everyone's liking. Rene Descartes - Discourse on The Method, p. 4
It happened some time last Monday night or early Tuesday morning. The Oracle of Ottawa's page view counts on his Google + and his 'umble blog added up to over 1,000,000 views. It was another goal that I thought I had set impossibly high and would never be achieved. But yet again I over achieved without even really trying. Now I have to think of some other impossible thing to go for.
The Oracle of Ottawa hones up another one...
The Oracle of Ottawa has taken the summer off. Due to the ongoing implosion of the Canadian right wing revolution and the soon to end 'Harper Government' the Oracle of Ottawa felt that his work was done. And has taken great pleasure in the fact that his words have helped to put another nail into the coffin of the 'Harper Government'. The polling numbers are relentless and unchanging. The young Justin Trudeau will be the next Prime Minister of Canada, and it will be very well before the next set election date in 2015.
Yes indeed Dear Reader, the budget will indeed take care of itself, especially when you are going to legalize pot across Canada! The 'Harper Government' just can't even begin to deal with it. It is a joy to see the wingers twist. There are also very many other issues, too many to mention, that the conservatives are on the wrong side of history on. Rather then try to deal with it in rational manner, old Steve Harper is back up in northern Canada still hoping to find Franklin. You can't make this stuff up. The Oracle of Ottawa is pretty sure that Franklin and his company have been dead for very many years now. And besides they were not Canadians. If the Brits want look for him, well they should go ahead and knock themselves out. But so far in the last decade or two it has been a no show. Do you think there is information in that Dear Reader?
Now about that million page paradox. It was with great chagrin that the Oracle of Ottawa has slowly learned that one chippy comment on Google + would on average get ten times more hits then one of my highly crafted blog essays! How ignorant is that? You know Dear Reader how the Oracle of Ottawa feels about twitter and literature in 140 character batches. Yet I must come to the conclusion that the Oracle of Ottawa is just a total natural at it or that people are dumber than I thought in my wildest dreams.
The greatest evil has already come about, when there are poor men to be defended, and rich men to be restrained. Jean - Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse On Political Economy, 1755
I mean, how do you even measure that? Do you measure horizontally, or vertically? Or perhaps you measure from handhold to handhold? The Oracle of Ottawa has been out of the dating pool for a long time, but the desperate and varied interests of my Dear Readers never ceases to amaze the Oracle of Ottawa. It is time to solve another problem with the standard tools of logic and critical thinking.
Latina Velvet Booty...
It appears from some deep research on the internet, that booty is an American slang term for female buttocks. It also appears that booty has been of prime and intense interest going way back. (See earlier postings...) Why even the refined peoples of classical antiquity were very interested in their booty, and it kept many artists various occupied filling many and varied commissions for their rich patrons. Go figure.
For a young lad just starting out the Oracle of Ottawa recommends that you don't over do it at the start. You could ruin yourself before you mature into your prime. For a mere novice to attach himself to forty inch booty on his first run out is somewhat like driving the star ship directly into the first black hole on the horizon.But as you work your way up to it you will soon come to understand why men want to climb the highest mountains, and write the greatest American Novels.
As with all things, repeated and focused attention to the ultimate goal is all important. It is the greatest hope that maybe people ages from now will sing your booty chasing prowess in song forever.
In the Province of Ontario there is a game called Point - Spread offered up by the folks at Ontario Lottery and Gaming. It is offered in baseball (MLB), hockey (NHL) and football; both NFL and CFL! The "authority" assigns a value or a handicap figure to the perceived favorite of a matchup and you the punter simply have to decide if the team in question can win by more than a half point, a full point, and so on, or not. You can select from two to twelve games. The prize for picking the spread right for twelve consecutive games is one thousand times the wager. In Ontario at the time of this writing you can wager from two to one hundred dollars on one ticket. Imagine! Turning a two-ney into two thousand dollars!
Probability, even simple probability is very weird...
And in Canada it gets even better, the winnings are tax free! Provided of course that you are not doing it as a business, but only as a hobby. (If you are employing fifteen "runners" to place your tickets, odds are that you will be declared a business, so one must be careful.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is now on the verge of July. And everyone knows that July and August are nearly the two most important months of the MLB baseball season. Along with April, May, and June, not forgetting of course, September and October.... Again the Oracle of Ottawa is contemplating the fine points and eternal mysteries of the "spread". How hard can it be? Picking the correct result of the spread in a mere two games pays two times money. Two dollars becomes four dollars. There are games every day, why a really sharp person could own the world! Two events, with only two possible outcomes, Bust or Cover, gives the punter a one in four chance of doubling his money. That is like flipping two heads in a row, or hitting cold on two babes and getting their phone numbers one right after the other, stuff that the Oracle of Ottawa has done over and over in his long life with total ease. But sub in the words point spread and it might as well be infinity.
The cold hard odds of picking the spread on twelve consecutive games is a mere 1 in 4096. Close inspection will reveal that that is one of the fairest props going. And it is fair. We are not talking soccer or cricket here. What keeps the Oracle of Ottawa up late in these summer nights is the certain knowledge that he has done far better at events with much, much higher odds. Take for example a twelve question test where there are four possible answers for each question. We now go from 1 in 4096 to 1 in 16,777,216! That is on a twelve question multiple choice quiz with four possible answers for each question, there are 16, 777, 216 ways to answer! And 531, 441 ways in which you can answer all twelve questions wrong!
The paradox to the Oracle of Ottawa is that he can remember far more than one instance in his long life where by he has aced a twelve question multiple choice test with four choices offered for each question...Yet for the sheer life of me at the time of this writing, the Oracle still has yet to cash out on a three gamer point spread ticket. Which has the hard odds of 1 in 8, and which pays five times money.
P.S.
Friday last there were 13 MLB games on the list. The Oracle of Ottawa focused for one more try and doped up all the days games. Then in fear that he might be becoming a problem gambler at two dollars a throw per day, put away the list in revulsion. The plan was to play two twelve gamer tickets one starting from the top and the other from the bottom of the list. Yesterday the Oracle decided to teach himself a lesson once and for all and check the results. There is no way on Earth that anyone can pick the spread results for thirteen games! Well Dear Reader you are right, I only picked 11 out of the possible 13!! If the Oracle would have played the two long shot tickets, he would have had two tickets that had 10/12 correct results, which pays 10 times money! My high stakes of $4.00 would have become $40.00... The Oracle is sure there is a moral to this story, but he just can't put his finger on it....
Laminar flow is one of the physical phenomena, with the most striking demonstrations, that we seem to know the least about. The Oracle of Ottawa has started coming across it over and over lately, while carrying on the "thinking about thinking" project. One of the most powerful demonstrations of it can usually be observed in water fountains that are in public buildings such as shopping malls and airports. There is one in Ottawa, at the Orleans shopping mall, where a laminar flow column of water goes nearly a hundred feet high in a perfect tube of water. Once you see it, you never forget it. Especially when it is surrounded by columns of water in turbulent flow.
Laminar flow(a) - Turbulent flow(b)
How this trick is achieved with water is strikingly easy. They insert a tube of tubes in the pipe of the laminar flow column. The Oracle of Ottawa finds it cosmically ironic that making the water (fluid) flow through what you would think be a constrictive construct would actually make the water flow super smooth, go figure, God does not only play dice, He / She has a morbid sense of humor to top it all off.
Even more weird is that if you look up laminar flow in a university physics text, even the extended version, laminar flow gets all of less than two of the texts one thousand plus pages! Laminar flow occurs in all liquids and in any fluid mechanics text, air is considered a fluid. The Oracle of Ottawa checked in some of the texts that he has on heat engines, and even in the newer texts, the authors admit that not much is known about laminar flow inside a heat engine of any type! The Oracle of Ottawa cannot help but think that there is a huge field of research here. And huge opportunities for major improvements in performance and efficiency with little up front cost. The Oracle of Ottawa may discuss a few these ideas in later posts...
All this weirdness was opened up by two Englishman of the nineteenth century; George Stokes and Osborne Reynolds. Now this Reynolds guy put all the magic of laminar flow in an equation that gives up the value of the Reynolds number. He also wrote a very weird book called The Sub-Mechanics of the Universe. And that is one read that the Oracle of Ottawa will have a look at in PDF format. He had some very out there ideas that would probably be very useful in the "thinking about thinking" project. The Oracle of Ottawa also finds it ironic that Reynolds life overlapped that of Karl Marx... Hmmm. There will be more on this insanely esoteric subject in the near future...
Thinking itself is not a natural process like eating, but an acquired skill like playing the piano: how well one will think will depend primarily on how much of it one has already done. Northrop Frye, On Education, p. 27
The Oracle of Ottawa's "thinking about thinking" project still continues anon. At this point there are no doubt many dear readers who are wondering how it is all going. And the Oracle of Ottawa has thought the time right to give a very forceful demonstration of the "method" in action, with proof in actual footage. Proof how powerful logical left to right critical thinking can be, just a simple algorithm to a complex goal. This demonstration shows how all types of people can work at a set goal without having ever met. And the incredible unexpected results this simple process can yield.
Challenge - Make one of these at home...
The gas turbine evolved out of the development of the jet engine which was invented by Hans von Ohain and Frank Whittle, of course the German guy got to all the milestones first, contrary to what all of us were taught in school here in North America. As is usual the German guy got the patent and the first jet powered airplane into the air and the Englishman got all the glory. Frank Whittle ended up in the United States at the US Naval Academy as a prof, while Hans von Ohain was brought to America like a captured skilled slave under Operation Paperclip. How do you like the history of your (our) country so far?
Any way, a jet turbine is a simple and yet a rather complex device that essentially compresses, ignites and exhausts a flow of air for the purpose of generating thrust. Although invented by individuals, they were developed by the near unlimited resources of nation states. But while the Oracle of Ottawa was watching engine porn on You-Tube there seems to be a standing challenge to build the simplest gas turbine possible. Otherwise known as the pop can turbine. You would think that was all pretty foolish, but when you start to check it out, you will soon be blown away by the utter craft and cleverness of the home garage-ist tinkerer. The Oracle of Ottawa simply finds it all staggering in its implications and to what is really possible in our near futures. If these guys are doing this in their garage...
The first video that really impressed the Oracle of Ottawa doesn't reach full operation, or compression, whereby it would run on its own power, but it is very impressive in that it truly is made out of tin cans! Damn! The experimenter got it just to the edge, you can see that he got way over 10,000 rpm(!), and a fine focus of the fireball, it is just on the verge of shifting to the high whine of a real engine coming to life. The Oracle has watched this quite a few times and every time he simply astounded....
And you don't have to search very hard for the guy that actually pulled it off! The second video is again simply astounding. Not only did this agent get the engine to run fully, but he has it all instrumented! And the Oracle of Ottawa can only wonder what his neighbors thought of the guy next door running a rotating engine at a mere 67,000 r.p.m.!! in the driveway! But that is the power of the "thinking about thinking" method, and it just blows the Oracle of Ottawa totally away.
Now the Oracle of Ottawa did "shop" way back in high school, and he was awesome at the drafting and machine shop, but the idea that someone could fabricate a working gas turbine or even a very near working one was just thought to be totally impossible. But with You-Tube and one person showing everybody else how he or she did it, and the next guy that makes a brilliant and elegant breakthrough, the Oracle of Ottawa never gets tired of that. The power of "thinking about thinking"...
The Oracle of Ottawa is not using the above epigraph in jest, I really cannot stand the great majority of people that I come across. The Oracle of Ottawa does not do "lunch", or Facebook, and would never be caught dead "networking"! The Oracle of Ottawa does carry a cell phone, but it is always turned off, I don't want to speak to you or anybody else. If you wanted to be my "mentor" I would quickly tell you to kiss my fucking ass! I would rather drop dead then suck up to anybody for favor or any kind of information. To the Oracle of Ottawa cultivation is something that happens on a farm or in a garden.
Hell really is other people...
This blog is now way over two hundred posts, and it has been very weird, all the posts that I thought would get a ton of hits and comments barely ever got a view! Imagine my chagrin. All the people pieces that I have done, I have done out of rage and utter offense, mere throw-aways, to make me feel better, and then to be forgotten. I never in my wildest dreams thought that those posts would make up my top ten posts! Now that is really ignorant! What does one do now? Re-evaluate his position and sell out for the adsense money? The Oracle of Ottawa does not see that happening any time in the near or distant future. I am rather starting to build a defense that it is all a random process beyond my control.
This whole writing thing has been very enlightening. Like Hunter S. Thompson always said in many of his letters; "If you want to really understand something, just start writing about it"! Hey! Come to think about it, the great Doctor spent a very great amount of his life avoiding most people...
There are pairs of losing games which if played one after the other become a winning combination. Whereas you would expect the combination of two losing games in sequence always tend to lose. Michael Clark, Paradoxes From A To Z, (Second Edition), p. 155
As any reader of this blog will now know the Oracle of Ottawa loves his paradoxes! A paradox is the tip of the iceberg that we can see over the wall of the limitations of our existence. They are very important. A paradox is proof that such useless things as the study of philosophy can be very profitable indeed. Paradoxes also prove that we don't have such a solid grasp of our respective reality's as we are lead to believe. A paradox is an indicator of all the knowledge that we are not yet aware of.
What is the optimal algorithm?
One paradox that has captured the Oracle of Ottawas attention of late is known in the literature as the Parrondo Paradox. It is the work of one J. M. R. Parrondo. I will leave it to the reader to track down all the forms that this striking oddity can appear. It is not a waste of time and you will get a lot out of it.
Back in my working days I was in a very large office lottery pool in a government office somewhere in Ottawa. The guy that ran it was old Bob. The way an office lottery in Ottawa usaully works is that you cough up some money every week. All the winnings go into a pool that is distributed just before Christmas. We had a great run with this pool. All of us shared in a prize of a couple of grand once! It was just before the closing of my first home purchase and it came in mighty handy, paying my closing costs and enabling a larger down payment that of course lowered my monthly payment. The mortgage has been paid off for a while now, but the thought of how to maximize the office lottery has kept popping up in my thinking.
J.M.R. Parrondo
If you are running a large pool or are buying a lot of tickets on a regular basis, you want to, at the least, play the most plays for the least possible amount money. A possible way to do this is to split up the number of plays between two or more lotteries per play cycle. For example in the province of Ontario there are at least three weekly lotteries that I like to take a flyer on. I think of it as "Extended Diversification". I once saw in a serious Investment text book that you should put at least a fraction of one percent of your yearly take into such bets! My combination at present is Lotto-Max, Lottario, and Ontario 49. There are not too many lotteries anywhere you could possibly win a seven figure prize for 50 cents a play! It is quite weird, but I am most always cashing winners in and keeping the over all cost down.
