Colen's Blog
So apparently Word 2007 will include blogging support. That’s right, you’ll be able to write blog posts from inside Word and have it upload them automatically. I predict the next feature announced will be a kitchen sink with every purchase.
More details here.
this interweb site I found air travel was well founded in the 30s, so let’s assume that stuff was happening by 1925 or so. So that’s 20 years from “hay guys we can fly” to selling tickets flying across the english channel. BUT, that was helped by a war.
Scorponok’s Timeline of Space Flight
By the time I’m 55, I’ll be able to fly into space! Yay!
I have decided to put my gigantic brain to work deciding what the future will be like. To aid my studies, I have imagined what it was like 20 years ago, in an attempt to project that change FORWARD IN TIME. In 20 years time, I will point to my incredibly accurate prophecies and show how ahead of the curve I was. Of course, if I was wrong I just won’t tell anyone, so it’s a win-win situation for me. Hopefully I can exploit this and become the new Nostradamus, with the difference of being relevant. And still alive. So not that much like Nostradamus.
Part 1: The Kitchen
Kitchen Of The Past
Let’s look at a kitchen 20 years ago. Ignore for the moment the horrible 70s colour scheme and the terrible pattern on the cupboards, they were fashionable back then… the poor things. What’s different from your kitchen right now? There’s no microwave, and no dishwasher. Other than that it looks pretty similar – there’s still a stove, an oven, a sink, etc. This is boring! Quickly! To the future!
Kitchen Of The Future
Dishwashers will continue to get better, but will remain pretty much the same outward look – apart from 20 years difference in style, there’s not much difference there. The stove will probably be the same, except that it might be smaller – only 2 or 3 hobs, to save on space (space is at a premium in The Future). If you’re rich it’ll still be 4 hobs, don’t worry.
The main difference is going to be the oven. Depending on how new your oven is (I’m thinking 5-10 years old at the most) the oven will be a combined oven / microwave / thing. Instant meals will be much more common in The Future, so the oven will have evolved to deal with them – it’ll be much more common to bring something home, oven it for 10 minutes and eat it. The Ovenwave™ will scan an RFID tag on your meal and use a combination of microwave cooking and normal heating to cook it perfectly, then beep at you when it’s ready. Many families will still have microwaves, in case they need to heat up a pot noodle while their Ovenwave™ is cooking a meal for someone else.
And that’s it – otherwise, the Future Kitchen will be the same as the kitchen today.
Some or more of you may know that I’ve recently taking up gambling as a recreational pasttime, specifically low-limit texas hold-em. Counting all hold-em I’ve played in my entire life, I’m probably about $100 up at this point (yeah, I know, don’t quit my day job). Today I spent 4 hours at the Bay 101 Casino and emerged $22 richer for my efforts. Which got me thinking… I made $22, but how much did the casino make?
All the casino’s I’m familiar with take a “rake” every hand, which is sometimes a flat fee or often a percentage of the total pot. The Bay 101 has a flat rake of $4 per hand. That means for every hand, no matter who wins or loses, they make $4. Doesn’t sound like much, but read on.
During my game today, I played with about 15-20 different people. Of those, almost everyone except the other 8 who were there when I left busted out and lost all their money. (One or two people left to play at different tables.) So that means about 8 people lost all the money they were playing with. Several other people (I’m going to say about 5) lost all their money but kept playing by buying more chips. So that’s about a dozen people who lost all their chips. When I left, who was “up”?
That was it. So those dozen people who lost redistributed their money to us 3, to the tune of about $250 dollars. But they all STARTED with $50-100 each. Assuming they all started with $75, $75 * 12 = $900. Where did the extra $650 go?
How many hands did we play? Probably about 30-35 an hour. So say 130 hands over 4 hours, each of which the casino charges $4 for. Remember – the game is not played against the casino, you are just playing against other people, so the odds are not stacked against you from the start. $4 * 130 = $520. For the privilege of playing, the casino charged us all over $500 – $130 an hour. The dealer probably gets paid what, $10-20 an hour? Even if it’s $30 an hour, the casino makes $100 PER HOUR just having us there playing. They’re not winning any money from us – they’re just taxing what we win from each other.
I’m not sure there’s really any point to this, other than:
How do I predict if there’ll be a housing market crash in the san francisco bay area? Help plz. Colin, I’ve told you before that your idea of causing a crime wave like in that one police academy movie won’t work. For one thing I just don’t have the time to go around burgling houses.