Saturday, June 30, 2007

On 24 (again)

The only one thing in 24 that is quite good is Nina Mayer. She is the smartest (by far) character on the show, she knows what she wants, and she is also good looking. Maybe is worth watching for her.

24.

The problem with 24 (I'm talking about the first series, it's the only one that I have seen...and I'll try to keep it like that!) is that it constantly insults your intelligence.

It's addictive and full of unexpected turns, but each one of them makes you say "naaaaaa, it's not like that". "WTF? s/he could have done that 5hours ago!". (or maybe tomorrow, get a rest). If you get two moles that high in a government agency (think of money and time) you do not want to waste both of them like this.

C'mon, the whole thing makes no sense at all. We're that not stupid.

The other problem I have with it is that after hour 4 I think you have already heard "mywifeanddaughter" a million times. By hour 12 you start hoping they kill one of them, so that at least they'd talk about the two separately.

The other other problem is that if you have a good piece of the plot (let say, for the sake of argument, "kidnapping+super rescue") you can't repeat it 3 times in a day. I know it's good, people love it etc, but you can't see the same plot 3 times in 24hours.

The other (x3) problem is that if each hour 2-3 people are shot, on that day about 50 people will have been killed. (+200 on a plane for no apparent reason). Naaa.

Finally, Jack Bauer is Chuck Norris.

No thanks.

Tentar non nuoce.



Geekissimo e Ollo store ti regalano un Nokia N95

Io non ho mai vinto alla lotteria (ma neanche tanto giocato a dire il vero) dai tempi della lotteria del minibasket...

Friday, June 29, 2007

Casino.

Oggi ero in mezzo a piccadilly c'erano milione di poliziotti, strada sbarrata, sirene....traffico bloccato...insomma casino.

Poi ho capito che era questo.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Quote rosa.

Ascoltavo prima Veltroni che diceva che meta' del partito democratico saranno donne. Io metterei come priorità assoluta quella di avere il 100% di persone competenti.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Garanzie.

"Antonio Manganelli nuovo capo della polizia". Ale', dopo questa ci vuole un papa che si chiama "Amodio".

Friday, June 22, 2007

My next laptop.

This would be it. Scommetto che tra meno di un anno ci saranno almeno 20GB in flash memory, e magari costera' ancora meno.

rai.tv

Rai.tv e' partito un po' zoppicante, che non si vedeva su linux (pieno di controlli ActiveX etc). Adesso l'hanno un po' sistemato, con il risultato che...posso vedere blob.

Meglio di Schwarzenegger

Quando ho saputo che Fred Thompson magari si candidava come presidente USA, per un attimo ho sperato che fosse Jack McCoy.

Dicevamo...

C'e' stato un breve silenzio stampa un po' a causa di cose da fare (prima) e poi a causa di una bella intossicazione alimentare (salmonella?).

Non mi e' venuto in mente di scrivere qualcosa dal bagno.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Movie list.

From time to time I vote on imdb the movies I've seen (recently or not). I thought I might share the list...

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Fine della fiera.

Boia faus, siamo arrivati in fondo alla fila. Ah-h.

Ora un po' di relax, un po' di dramsoc, un po' di altre cosette...si ritorna a casa verso la fine di Agosto.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The last one.

(10:38:13 PM) Pietro: who cares
(10:38:14 PM) Pietro: I mean
(10:38:16 PM) Pietro: is the f* last one.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Understanding the Vaio EC.

This is about the embedded controller in my vaio s4, just some info on how memory is used there.

0x17: last address written

0x93: FAN0: fan speed. (you can set this directly, but will be reset in 1 second by something I don't know)
0x94: IRST: bit 8, cd power. You can't write this directly, see the CDPW method
0x96: BRIT (does nothing)
0x97: CONT, CTR method
0x9B: SIRQ: some how is set to 8,

0xA6-7 (16 bits): B1V0: voltage in the battery
0xC0-1 (16 bits): A1TP: temperature
0xC4-5 (16 bits): A1PT: passive trip point
0xC6-7 (16 bits): A1CT: critical trip point
0xC8-9 (16 bits): A2TP: some other temperature sensor

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Incontri, o no.

Ieri per la strada, davanti a Gloucester Road Tube Station ho incrociato Ivan Scalfarotto. (Credo, non e' che sia proprio sicuro, pero'.)

Song of the day.

Jethro tull - Wond'ring Aloud

( poi un giorno faremo un po' di dietrologie su

...I'm tasting the smell
of toast as the butter runs.
Then she comes, spilling crumbs on the bed
and I shake my head...


ma non oggi)

Il poli delle meraviglie.

Prendo spunto dai titoli di Bisio per postare questa chicca:


I am not entirely sure of what they mean, but it just appeared on the bathroom door.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Punto informatico.

Oggi punto informatico ha questa bella frase:
Con un thermal design power (TDP) di soli 9 watt ed core clock di 1 GHz, il Sempron 2100+ si presta ad essere utilizzato in sistemi thin client, pint-of-sale (POS), chioschi e set-top box.

In una sola frase ci sono:

"ed core"
"pint-of-sale" (che e', ti vendono pinte di birra??)
"chioschi" (lol, dal giornalaio....sara' anche la traduzione corretta di kiosk...ma fa ridere!)

va beh, sono puntiglioso.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Conditional probability

This is a follow-up to yesterdays exam, that caused some discussion afterwards. This is what I believe is correct.

The circle is the total number of students that take the exam, the sectors are the tree professor, and the small circle in the inside is the students that fail. We will call the number that fail fx and the number that pass !fx. The subscript x indicates under which professor the exam was taken. Let's call F the event the any student that fail and !F the event that a student doesn't fail.



The whole circle represents (F+!F), call it 1 (normalized). The whole green sector, i.e. A, is the number of students that take the exam, times the probability of A, that is (F+!F)*P(A) = P(A).

The darker green region, i.e. FA, is the number of students that take the exam with A and fail, i.e. P(A) * (fa)/(fa+!fa). This is clearly dependent on the number of students that take the exam with A (or, equivalently, on the number of days A is examining, i.e. P(A))

We know that if the examiner is A then 12% fail. What this means is that fa/(fa+!fa) = 0.12. This is not the same as FA. In fact this information (the fraction of students that fail with professor A) doesn't depend on the number of students A is examining. Therefore, if we want to define it in terms of F ∩ A, we'll have that 0.12 = P(F ∩ A)/P(A). that is the definition of P(F|A).

Another way of looking at it is to consider the inner circle, i.e. P(F). Since A,B,C form a partition

P(F) = P(F ∩ A) + P(F ∩ B) + P(F ∩ C).

This is P(F) = P(F|A)*P(A) + P(F|B)*P(B) + P(F|C)*P(C). This is not P(F|A) + P(F|B) + P(F|C).

If we wrongly consider 12% as P(FA), then the total number of students that fail will not depend any more on the events A, B, C happening, i.e. even if professor A doesn't turn up at all, the same number of students will fail (even if the % of students failing with professor C and B is lower!). This is incorrect.

Let's now have an event D, i.e. the event that one - and only one - student fail. The total probability of D will be:

P(D) = P(D|A)*P(A) + P(D|B)*P(B) + P(D|C)*P(C).

as D is a special case of F, D is a subset of F.

We know that P(F|A) is 0.12, so clearly if we have n students taking the test with A, the probability of only one student failing with A will be 3*(0.12)(1-0.12)n-1. This, again, does not depend on A happening, because is "given" that A has happened. In other words it is not P(D ∩ A), it is P(D ∩ A)/P(A).

EDIT: damn, I got the nCr bit wrong. Thanks Daniel for telling me.