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Feel free to drop me a line at laura.nunn@gmail.com

Thursday, February 21, 2013

I'm a mug

As I believe it has been established on the Plog before, Mrs Nunn is quite, quite mad.  This insanity extends to believing in horoscopes.  I think she partially does this just to wind me up; as a rational human being, I refuse to believe in anything that can't be proved.  Mrs Nunn insists it can be proved.  But Mrs Nunn is - as I believe I mentioned already - quite, quite mad.

Our baby is five months old today.  Happy birthday, baby.  Whenever I mention something she's done (woken up every half hour through the night, for example), Mrs Nunn will delight in saying something like, "Well, that's because she's a Virgo."  No.  It's not because she's a Virgo.  It's because she's a sodding baby.

Anyway - for a joke (I hope) Mrs Nunn bought me a mug for Christmas with typical characteristics of Librans (my star sign) emblazoned on the side.

It brought to mind an experiment Derren Brown did a few years ago where he told participants he was giving them a personalised horoscope, wrote the same old guff for all twenty of them, and all twenty of them couldn't believe how accurate it was.  It's quite easy generally to make sweeping statements that most of the population can relate to.  From memory, it was stuff like, "you'd like to write a novel", "you put a brave face on things, but feel things more deeply than you let on" and similar gobshite.  Stuff most of us believe about ourselves on some level.

Bearing this in mind, and how easy it should be to appeal to the general populous, the Libran mug Mrs Nunn purchased for me somehow manages to capture the absolute opposite of my character.  Which is quite a feat.

According to the mug I am:

  • Charming (am I bollocks)
  • Diplomatic (the very evidence of this blog suggests otherwise)
  • Intelligent (which I just typed "ubyelligent" because I had fingers over the wrong keys)
  • Thoughtful (uhuh)
  • Sociable (my ideal evening is being in the bath with a book, not having to talk to anyone at all ever)
  • Sentimental (nope)
  • Flirty (fuck off)
  • Optimistic (I'd like to be, but I don't think it would work out)
So, good work, mug company.  Or horoscope company.  Or more likely, some overworked temp called Lizzie typing out one load of shit after another.

A bit like me.  Perhaps she's a Libran too.

Sunday, February 03, 2013

House of cards

Maths has never been my strong suit.  Since leaving school, I've not yet found a situation where I've needed to calculate the third side of a right-angled triangle, or the circumference of a circle, much less use simultaneous quadratic equations to... well, God knows what actually.  Simultaneous quadratic equations may actually be the world's least useful things.

Apart from Thames Water customer services, obviously.

In Real Life, I have probably only ever used the following maths:

  • Addition
  • Subtraction
  • Percentages
Most, if not all of which was taught prior to age 11.  So there we go.  Secondary school maths completely irrelevant.

Anyway, because we lead exciting and glamorous lives, one of TheBloke (TM)'s and my favourite pastimes is to play simultaneous games of Freecell.

For those of you who don't know what Freecell is... well never mind.  It's basically a kind of card game.  A bit like Patience.

The version we use allows you to input a game number between 1 and 1,000,000.  If we both enter the same number, we can effectively play against each other, and see who finishes first.  Not that I am competitive.

If you don't enter a number, the computer will randomly generate a game for you.

Earlier this week, TheBloke (TM) shouted out the number of the game his computer had randomly generated for him, and I went to select my game... only to notice that my computer had by itself selected the exact same game!

Freaky.  Time to play the lottery?

Anyway, maths bods - help me out.  My failure to pay attention in class in maths means I can't quite work out the statistics.  What are the chances of us getting the exact same game?

Is it one in a million (i.e. it's exactly as likely I will get - for example - game 2233 as it is that TheBloke (TM) does), or is it one in a million to the power of a million?

Either way, I think this all goes to prove that my life is empty.  Send chocolate.