Obsolete Your Idols

While on the course of wondering something almost as silly, I decided to see what kind of distribution of software packages my laptop has installed.  It turns out to be skewed wildly in favor of the letter L.

dpkg –get-selections |  grep -v deinstall | cut -c 1 | sort | uniq -c

• 1 9
• 44 a
• 44 b
• 74 c
• 44 d
• 66 e
• 57 f
• 178 g
• 26 h
• 33 i
• 9 j
• 29 k
• 1015 l
• 61 m
• 40 n
• 44 o
• 134 p
• 8 q
• 23 r
• 65 s
• 99 t
• 45 u
• 10 v
• 17 w
• 117 x
• 1 y
• 6 z

Crusts

Originally uploaded by Binder Of Daemons

If I squint really hard, these elements look like a face.

There are a number of people who make predictions for the coming year.  If they predicted events for the previous year, they’ll review them, score themselves on their accuracy.  Often they find that they’ve done about as well as a coin flip.  Which brought me the idea of making predictions which were exactly coin flips.  For each of these, I’ve constructed them as an A or B choice and flipped a Missouri state quarter to determine my prediction.  At the end of the year, or perhaps at the start of 2009, I’ll review and see how accurate the coin was, and whether the representative of Missouri did better than the average coin flip.

After the 2008 elections:

• the President will be a Democrat  (Republican)
• the House of Representatives will have a (Democratic) Republican majority
• the Senate will have a Democratic (Republican) majority

During 2008:

• The price of a PlayStation 3 will (remain stable) fall
  
• Nintendo Wiis will remain scarce (become abundant)
• One Laptop Per Child will thrive (fade into obscurity)
•  Amazon’s Kindle will (catch on) fade away
• George R. R. Martin will (will not) complete the Song of Fire and Ice
• An earthquake of at least 7.0 magnitude will (will not) hit the Bay Area
• A flu pandemic (will) will not afflict America

There you have it, ten predictions from the most sage quarter I could find.  Predictions are in bold, anti-predictions are in parenthetical notes.  Check back in a year or so to find out how well this quarter did.