A few years back Wendy's had an offer where if you got a medium or large drink there was a coupon on it. 32 coupons got you a one-way flight in the continental US, 64 got you a round-trip flight. Being a poor college student at the time, a few friends and I went dumpster diving at all the local Wendy's and over a couple nights ended up getting about 4 round-trip tickets. The only drawback was having to throw out those clothes..
Wow i had never heard of this offer. But it seems like it was a good deal without even dumpster diving.
What does a Medium Drink at Wendys cost? Probably $1.50?
So buying 32 medium drinks would cost $48, which would get you a free one-way flight in the US. $48 (plus all the drinks you can handle and diabetes to prove it) is an insane deal for plane ticket.
By this logic a round trip ticket would cost ~$96 which is also a steal.
Even without dumpster diving, $48 is a great deal for a ticket even if you just dumped the soda out or never filled up the cup at the fountain.
My friends and I got a few round trip plane tickets once. Wendy's had a deal where their largest drinks had coupons to cut off their sides. I think 60 coupons got you a one-way domestic ticket on AirTran and 120 got you round trip. We were kids so we went dumpster diving at a couple local restaurants, found hundreds and hundreds of cups, and walked away with 3 or 4 round trip tickets. Not nearly as amazing as 1.25 million air miles, but we were pretty proud of ourselves.
I've just used vanilla extract before.. it doesn't take much, treat it like cologne. It smells much better than bug sprays and you don't have any weird residue.
I always assumed mosquitoes are going by the IR/heat emissions, but apparently they follow smell. They also have very rudimentary olfactory system, which is easy to confuse by filling the area with a smell "override". It could be a bug spray or a citrus smell (citronella, etc) or it could be a smell that humans don't even pick up. Latter is weird, but it works really well - it's a small plastic dispenser bottle with a wick and heater element on top, just like an oil-based air freshener, but it has no smell whatsoever.
It'll be interesting to see which company Google's autocomplete ends up suggesting when someone types "Moz".. right now it's Mozilla, but with SEOmoz's abilities I wonder if that'll change.
I wonder if there's any sort of somewhat even distribution to the winning tickets. If it's entirely random, there's shouldn't be. However, I knew a guy who worked at a gas station and he'd watch whenever people bought a bunch of tickets. If they scratched them off right there and didn't win anything, he'd buy the next few tickets. I believe he spent about $50-$100/week, but regularly won about $150/week.
Check that he is reporting each and every time that he is playing. Ideally he should be writing the gambling in an Excel or Googledocs spreadsheet. Every one of them for at least three months.
A common problem is that the people report only the good events and forget the bad strikes. Other problem is partial compensations: "I won +$50 and +$10$ and I only lost once -$30." really means "The firs week I won +$50. The second weak y lose -$40, but it not a lose because they come from the money I had won in the first weak. The third weak I won again +$10. I only was unlucky in the fourth weak because I lose -$30."
It's not voluntary lying. Lucky strikes are interesting anecdotes, unlucky strikes are expected and boring. And bad memory and "compensations" are normal human bias. So write down everything systematically, or it's not useful to make statistics.
We use TVEyes.com in our news monitoring product and it's very close to real-time. It does make mistakes sometimes, but I'm not aware of any perfect transcription software.
I'm actually looking into this a little right now since I happen to work for a media monitoring company. I can tell you there is a definite correlation between them, but haven't been able to determine if it's a leading or lagging indicator.
I had never heard of these "atmospheric rivers" prior to this article and started doing a little reading.
"Atmospheric rivers are typically several thousand kilometers long and only a few hundred kilometers wide, and a single one can carry a greater flux of water than the Earth's largest river, the Amazon River." [1]
That's really impressive. I'm curious about their density and whether airplanes have to avoid them, or if they're able to fly through.
