New Florence. New Renaissance.

Cupcake ATM

If you're craving a cupcake in the middle of the night, unless you planned ahead and have some on your counter, your only choice might be those nasty ones at your local all-night grocery store. That is, until Sprinkles, one of the L.A.-based bakeries deemed responsible for kicking off the international cupcake craze, launches their 24-hour cupcake access.

From the company

"This automatic cupcake machine dispenses freshly baked cupcakes, cupcake mixes, apparel and even cupcakes for Fido! In the heart of Beverly Hills nestled between Sprinkles Cupcakes and the brand new Sprinkles Ice Cream, 24 Hour Sprinkles will be continuously restocked day and night with a variety of freshly baked cupcake flavors."

LAist

Mega-Millions Probability

You have heard what your chances of winning $ 640 million tonight are, so if you are curious how this is calculated here you go

“The numbers picked for the prizes consist of 5 numbers picked at random from a pool of 56 numbers (the White Numbers). Then a single number (the Mega Number) is picked from a second pool that has 46 numbers. If the results of these random number selections match one of the winning combinations on your lottery ticket, then you win something.

In any combinatorics problem where all possible outcomes are equally likely, the probability of a successful outcome is determined by finding the number of successful combinations, and then dividing by the total number of all combinations. There are nine possible configurations that will win something in the Mega Millions Lottery. For each of these, the probability of winning equals the number of winning combinations for that particular configuration divided by the total number of ways the Mega Millions numbers can be picked.
Mega Millions Total Combinations

Since the total number of combinations for Mega Millions numbers is used in all the calculations, we will calculate it first. The number of ways 5 numbers can be randomly selected from a field of 56 is: COMBIN(56,5) = 3,819,816. (See themath notation page or Help in Microsoft's Excel for more information on “COMBIN”).

For each of these 3,819,816 combinations there are COMBIN(46,1) = 46 different ways to pick the sixth number (the “Mega” number). The total number of ways to pick the 6 numbers is the product of these. Thus, the total number of equally likely Mega Millions combinations is 3,819,816 x 46 = 175,711,536.”

Credit Durango Bill

Photo Credit

Book promotion

Offer for my blog readers - buy a copy of my new book (Amazon badge at left) and I will mail you copy of my last book, The New Polymath, a $ 39 list value. Email your proof of purchase and mailing address to thenewtechnologyelite AT gmail DOT com.

Offer valid till April 30 or till my stash of Polymath runs out. Readers outside US - due to customs restirctions, this offer is only for US addresses, so you are welcome to participate with a US mailing address for a friend or colleague.

 

Epcot Flower and Garden show

My wife and daughter are driving to Disney World today to take in the always fabulous Epcot celebration of flowers. If you find yourself in Orlando before May 20, put this on your must-do list.

21st Century Cocktails

There's an inescapable showmanship inherent in pouring liquid nitrogen into a champagne flute while a cloud of vapor billows from the -321°F fluid and puffs across the bar. But the show isn't the point at Booker & Dax, a brand-new New York cocktail bar in the back of David Chang's much-loved Momofuku Ssäm Bar, where supercold nitrogen, a laboratory centrifuge, and the like are used primarily to make drinks more delicious, and secondarily to create and serve them more efficiently. Only as an occasional side effect does a swell of fog or ceiling-high gout of flame provide entertainment to a customer.

Popular Science

 

New Book early metrics

BookScan, a service which tallies book sales from multiple sources shows hardback sales of The New Technology Elite in first week exceed those of New Polymath’s sales in its first month. For business books, that is a better metric than Amazon only sales.

Almost as many Elite Book Reviews on Amazon already as Polymath has got in total in 21 months.

More important from my speaking business point of view, over 800 SlideShare views in 2 weeks of Elite slides, compared to that much for Polymath.

Finally, my Elite marketing costs so far, less than 15% of Polymath’s.

So far so good. Please keep sending your comments on the books and please think of events where I can come present the themes. Thanks.

Unilever and other sustainability leaders

The 2012 Sustainability Leaders: A GlobeScan / SustainAbility Survey polled a total of 825 experts in January and February 2012 to better understand which companies and sectors of society, if any, are making any progress in advancing the sustainability agenda.

Here are the leading companies recognized from the survey:

Longest flights

In the 80s, I  flew Dhahran-New York multiple times. In the last decade, I have flown New York-Mumbai a few times. But they are babies compared to the new benchmarks the A380 and the recent 747 model increasingly allow.  US News lists a few of the current “are we there yet?” champs.

It includes factoids such as “Most people are surprised to learn that this trip (Los Angeles-Singapore) takes longer than the airline's Newark-Singapore flight, which travels about 800 more miles. The Newark flight path across the North Pole subjects the aircraft to less wind resistance, allowing it to travel faster than the flight from L.A., which crosses the Pacific Ocean.”

The video below shows the All-Business class configuration on the Newark flight – Singapore Air 21

Crowdsourced maps

(Israeli company) Waze is taking off in countries that don't already have good digital maps, such as Costa Rica and Malaysia. Entire portions of the global street map are being filled in not by professionals, but by ordinary citizens with smart phones. If maps are subject to the same forces that have affected online encyclopedias, then the arc of history is clear: crowdsourcing isn't just cheaper than expert-driven data, it's also potentially faster and more accurate.

MIT Technology Review

Really Big Data at the NSA

The NSA Chief has contradicted the story below in a Congressional hearing, but this Wired story on the agency’s technological reach makes for interesting reading.

“Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.””