Lotto programming

I have several posts at "My Back Pages" about my latest approach to generating combinations for the lottery. One thing that I want to mention is that we won most of our winnings from the last nine months using Gail Howard's wheels. The only game that they really worked well for was "Cash Five", but they worked pretty well. Everywhere I turn, people disparage Gail Howard's work, but I have found that I only started to win when I used her approach. I have moved on from there in the last four days, based on my work with "Pick 3" programming. I have read Isaac Nwokogba's book Ea$y Dollar$ and "Professor Jones's" book The Basics of Winning Lotto/Lottery. I combine the two approaches in my "Pick 3" program. The first uses "hot numbers" while the second uses "positional analysis". Hot numbers could be all you would need, but to win with pairs, you need to use positional analysis. I am now using hot numbers for "Cash Five" and "Lotto Texas".

My new approach

I did a quick implementation of my new approach to playing Cash Five last night. It uses "hot number" analysis and a full wheel. Once I have the wheeled combinations, I check to see if there are lines that have won more than others over the last 40 games. There are such lines and I take some number of those, ordered by descending frequency, and play those. It worked better than what I had been using.

Full wheels

I was pleasantly surprised that my recursive algorithm for generating unique combinations worked for 25 numbers. The algorithm produced 53010 combinations for 25 numbers. The algorithm produces "full wheels". I am currently using the algorithm for playing "Pick 3" with hot numbers. I also use "positional analysis". Between the two, we have won four times since a week-ago Monday.

Google Street View is simply awesome

I was talking with a woman about Denver, and about where I lived for 8 months in December 1994 to August 1995. I lived near the corner of Havana and Mississippi. There was a King Sooper supermarket there. I tried Google Maps to refresh my memory and then realized that I could see the street view for the corner. I can see from Google Street View that the King Sooper supermarket is still there. I was just inside Denver from Aurora, as I remembered the location. I could turn around and see what seems to be the mall on the opposite side of the street. The Conoco station is still there, as well.

Neanderthals

I was interested to read what should have been obvious: Neanderthals were part of Homo Sapiens, not a separate species. The fact that they could be part of fertile cross-breeds confirms that fact. I have long suspected, as have many other people, that Neanderthal traits have survived to this day in the general populace. E. M. Smith has a blog post with a photograph.

Bess Levin of DealBreaker

I have been interested in Bess Levin for a few years.

The Observer has a picture and story.

Lost freedom

A striking feature of life in 2010 is the gross over-regulation and criminalization of doing unhealthy things. As recently as 1998, we still have many freedoms left. Now, someone restricts businesses from letting people smoke in separate enclosed rooms, hurting small, locally-owned restaurants, people are required to do all sorts of things in their cars (often observed more in the breach than in compliance), and criminalizing activities that used to be considered to be "fair use" under the old copyright laws. Fines are now usually excessive for traffic violations and local, state, and federal government constantly intrude on our lives (or they want to, at least). The courts have stripped us of our constitutional rights because they figure that some good is accomplished by doing so. In the United States, though, we are in better condition than the Europeans. Britain and the Netherlands seem doomed, if they continue as they are. In the U.S., government risks driving the people into rebellion through repressive laws and enforcement. I find the whole prospect frightening, as I liked our situation even prior to 2001, if not prior to 1999.