Earlier this month the BBC reported this story Second lottery win for US woman.
The woman had won the $1m jackpot on two scratch cards in the last 4 years.
The odds of winning the first card were 1 in 5.2 million, whilst the odds of winning the second card was 1 in 705,600, so experts claim that the chances of her winning both games were an incredible 1 in 3,669,120,000,000. However these experts (or BBC researchers) are wrong. Yes if she had walked in to her newsagents and said can I have one Cool Million scratch card and can I also have a Jubilee one too, then the odds would have been that high. However I pretty sure that she will have purchased more than one of each of the scratch card, and for each time she purchase another one from the same game he odd drop.
For example the odds of winning a small lottery which only has 10 outcomes is 1 in 10. However if I purchase two different tickets for the same draw my odds half to 1 in 5. If I purchased all 10 combinations I must win. And the same goes for this woman. Lets assume that she loves scratch cards and that she had purchased 200 of each before she won the jackpot. Her odds would change from 1 in 3,669,120,000,000 to 40,000 in 3,669,120,000,000 or 1 in 91,728,000 which is a slightly smaller number (but still impressive).

The BBC and reporting that Marriage ‘keeps families united’

Couples with young children are five times more likely to split up if they are unmarried compared to those who have had weddings, the Tories claim.

Or is it that those who decided to get married were already in a strong relationship and more committed to each other, so already less likely to break up?

Now if I was Gordon Brown, the moment Tony announces the date, I too would announce that I was standing and possibly retiring from the house at the next election. Why would you want to run the country after the mess Tony has left it in. If he’s lucky he might win one election, and even that could be with a minuet majority and whilst unlikely imagine the embarrassment if he actually lost the next leadership election, it would destroy his political career. Instead Brown’s legacy would be a great economy, one of the best chancellors the country ever had.
I’d rather leave it at that myself.

Whilst I wish the couple all the best of luck, why is Keating widower weds weather girl being reported as news?

Today Breakfast on the BBC had one big story which was the new regulations with regards to School Dinners, they had every kind of commentator, and the BBC website have collection of articles about the issue.
So I was rather shocked when driving to work today to see this poster against one of the newsagents around the corner. Our local paper The Lincolnshire Echo seems to be giving away free McDonalds all week long.
Unfortunately we only get the Echo on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday at the moment so I can’t read the small print, but I’m guessing they won’t be stopping school kids from buying them.
However that’s the only fault I have with the paper. It’s now the only paper I actually read, they’re quite nice to me and they were the ones who caught out Jim Speechley. I’ve also found myself listening to Lincs FM since I began my boycott of Radio 1, and discovered that whilst local radio has a lot of adverts, it doesn’t have either Chris Moyles or Scott Mills talking forever and also includes rather useful stuff like traffic updates and relevant news.

Tag pictures for points with Google Image Labeler.
By playing the game, you can help Google build a better image search engine, as unlike flickr Google doesn’t have any real way of knowing what’s actually in the pictures it indexes.

As everyone else is doing this…

Like Will it’s pointless showing the rest of the world as I haven’t been there yet. Also I too have been to the Canaries (twice) which isn’t shown on the map.
And looking at the red, it seems that I haven’t really got that far away from England yet.

I’ve been with Betfair.com for some years now, and I think this is the first time I’ve bet against something.
Looking at the odds for the Premiership it seemed that the best bet was against Chelsea. I think they’ll come second or third this year, but just have no idea who’ll win. So by betting against them if any of the other 19 teams win I’m £20 up.

..but only in Lincolnshire?
Well that’s the view that Lincs FM news team gave twice today. They claim that “it’s bad news for people in the Lincs FM area as interest rates have gone up by a quarter of a percent.”
Now I’m wondering if you live in Nottingham and have quite a good aerial that you too might have your interest rates increased, but your neighbours with a bedside alarm radio won’t.

On Friday (actually more like early hours of Saturday) me and Heather decided to go to Birmingham for the weekend. We booked a room at the Premier Travel Inn and then after a short sleep made our way towards Bournville.

We had attempted to book tickets in advance for Cadbury World however you can’t book tickets on the day via the website. At £12.50 each it was a little dear, and the free chocolate was melting quickly. However the historic facts about Cadbury were interesting and it was a nice day out.

We then headed to the hotel to check-in, and then went out to the Bull Ring. I’ve been a couple of times to the new Bull Ring and it’s amazing how the place is so much nicer than before. We wandered around the shops until we almost fell asleep. The only problem I had was the litter. It was really disgusting. Some of the litter was from a red mobile phone company, but most of it was wrappers from an ice cream van that was giving out freebies.

We then headed back to the hotel for dinner and a good night’s sleep.

On Sunday we made our way to West Midland Safari Park, this was only £8.99 each and we got a lot more for our money. We spent two hours driving around the safari and there was loads to see. I think we both enjoyed the elephants most. However as they were the furthest away from the car the photos aren’t that great. After parking the car we had a look around the rest of the park, and whilst watching the snake man do his presentation I managed to get stung by a wasp, who decided that flying up my sleeve was a great idea. I panicked like a small child until the wasp finally flew away. We had a look at the theme park rides but at an extra £8.75 each to go on all the rides, and none of them being that exciting we gave that a miss.

Overall though we had a really nice weekend.