1,260 billion billion billion Monkeys

My friend Mark will soon be taking the ethics portion of the Illinois State Bar Exam, in the form of 50 A-D multiple choice questions. To pass, he will need about 32 right. 32/50 on a multiple choice test! That's a 64%! That's a D! And that doesn't sound like too high a bar to set for the lawyers in the great state of Illinois.

Of course, what you are now wondering is this: what are the odds of just guessing your way to a passing score? It's pretty apparent that you have a pretty good chance of getting 12 or 13 correct. That would be 1/4. And your odds of getting 10 or more right is 83.6%. But it's a lot tougher to improve beyond those meager scores than you'd think. Your odds of getting 20 or more correct drop down to 1.4%. But still, that's about 1 in 72. Which means that in a room full of 72 monkeys, trained to take multiple choice tests, we would expect 1 monkey to get 20 or better. Or, if you could get a 20/50, you would be as smart as about 72 monkeys.

But we haven't answer the question yet of how many monkeys to pass the test. Well, the problem with the probabilities on things like this, is that no matter how much you think the bottom has fallen out on your odds, it keeps falling out even faster than before. Your odds of getting 25 right are only ~ 1 in 8,162. That's a lot of monkeys. Getting to 30 requires 6,100,000 monkeys. And to get those extra two measly questions, we would have to add another 142.5 million monkeys to our room. That's a lot of #2 pencils.

And to get a perfect score? You guessed it, you'd have to be as smart as 1,260 billion billion billion monkeys.

Where was the band?

I'm not sure why more teams don't run this play. It was good for a 61 yard touchdown. I counted 15 laterals during the play that finally ended 58 seconds after time had expired.

Wombsly Needs a Name

Wombsly Blockburger just isn't going to fly with Shannon. Neither (despite my many efforts) is Clark David Wilson Blockburger, Junior. So, there you go. I'm all out of ideas. That makes this your big chance to step up and offer any and all suggestions you might have. We've got another ultrasound slated for November 7th, so you've only got until then to offer names for both boys and girls. After that, we'll be focusing down our efforts. Also, for the moment we're trying to focus in on good names, so you can just keep winners such as "Vandaleesha" and "Bamp" to yourself.

Back-to-back

So, this story is from months ago, and no one will really care at all, but I want to post it anyway.

A while back, we were over at the Hunt's, and KC pulled out his baseball card collection. He's got thousands and thousands of baseball cards which were mostly collected back in the 90s. They're stored in the standard baseball card books and organized by year and card company. The cards are in plastic pages, and you put the cards in back to back, so the front side of one card is visible on one side of the page, and the front of another card is visible on the other side.

(As a side note, I never organized my cards that way. It was always alphabetical by team and alphabetical by last name within the team. I think it shows a somewhat different focus in the collecting. Anyway . . .)

As I was flipping through some of his older cards, I saw he had a Joe Torre card. (Recently deposed manager of the NY Yankees.) I was interested, so I pulled it out to look at it and check out Joe's stats from when he was a player. As I pulled it out, I found that Torre's card was back to back with Terry Francona! What are the odds! For those of you who's minds aren't reeling, Francona is currently the manager of the Red Sox! KC didn't even know this! Anyway, I found this coincidence fascinating. Undoubtedly, you will all feel differently.

Beware, SLC

I just thought I'd let everyone in SLC know that you can't expect any more good weather until spring. You see, the weather man has moved back down to St. George. So, until he heads back north, I'm officially living in the land of the good weather.

Changing History

Today we were looking up the biggest NFL comeback ever on wikipedia. In 1993, the Bills came back from a 35-3 deficit in the second half to win 41-38 in OT. Or so we thought. Upon checking wikipedia, we discovered that the Bills did kick a field goal in OT to take a 41-38 lead, but then the Oilers went back in time to the 4th quarter and and kicked a field goal to leave the game a 41-41 tie. It was true, because wikipedia said so.

But then, with my incredible power, I reached back into time and changed the outcome of the game, back to how it really was to begin with. But I feel special for having edited a wikipedia article.

Now I can go introduce a humorous error in another page and have a clear conscience about it . . .

Au Contraire, Mr. Herbstreit

I just watched a short bit by Kirk Herbstreit on Sportscenter, and would like to rebut his fallacious arguments.

First, Kirk was asked if an undefeated USF warrants playing in the "national championship" game. His response was essentially, "No, a one loss LSU or Oklahoma is more deserving." About 30 seconds later, he was asked if the rash of upsets in college football this year is further evidence of the need for a playoff. His response was, "No, the great thing about college football is that the regular season counts." (This is a common argument against a playoff.) He continued, saying, "If anything, the BCS needs a 'plus one' system."

Now for my rebuttal. First, the easy one. Herbstreit called for a 'plus one' system, where BCS teams 1 and 4 play, and teams 2 and 3 play, with the winners meeting in a championship game. How exactly is this not a playoff system? Granted, most people calling for a playoff system are looking for an 8 or 16 team playoff, but the 'plus one' system is a playoff system. To call it otherwise is stupid. But instead, people like Herbstreit say "We don't need a playoff" and then are basically muttering under their breath, "but we should have a 4 team playoff."

Point number 2 is this: Herbstreit directly contradicts himself with the statements about USF and the regular season. By indicating that USF cannot go to the "national championship" game, he is saying that their regular season doesn't matter one bit. According to him, there is absolutely nothing they can do about it. He is, in effect, saying "The regular season counts, but for some schools, it doesn't count, because even if they win, we won't let them be the best anyway."

The Count of Monte Cristo

I just finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Seeing as how it's a "classic" and all, and that the movie was terrific, I figured I'd give it a try. I got a slightly abridged version, which cut it down to 550 pages or so. I'll assume that everyone has seen the movie, so you know the basic plot. Or, at least you think you do. In typical book to movie fashion, some things are trimmed out, and some things are changed all together, but, in non-typical book to movie fashion, they did an excellent job, and even after reading the book, I'm glad they made the movie the way they did. The book is roughly 1/3 Edmond Dantes, which is quite similar to the movie, except in some details regarding Edmond's "crime" and arrest. The 2/3 remaining are about the Count of Monte Cristo, and were quite different from what I expected. The first third moves very quickly, which is rather surprising for a book of this time. That changes in the latter 2/3 and strangely, the book isn't about the Count any more. Once he gets to Paris, the book becomes a high society bog of everyone visiting everyone else and servants calling for doctors and arranged marriages, and the Count is just one character of many.

Anyway, it's a good book. And remember, "We oughta file that under "Educational" too, oughten we?"

Journals

I was recently reading something published by the church talking about journal writing. It encouraged journal writers to focus on everyday events and good things, rather than simply listing all the bad things that happen in life. Not that bad things have to be avoided, but focusing on them will only serve to depress the writer and guarantee that no one will ever read the journal.

On a related note, Shannon isn't posting much, and I've sunk into another posting drought. Simply put, I don't want to write a daily report on Shannon feeling ill, and you don't want to read it. These days it's just a part of our lives.

I'll be playing the piano for a musical number in church on Sunday. These days I'm the choir pianist (because the old choir pianist is pregnant), and I'm the priesthood pianist (when the electric keyboard works), and I'm the emergency backup organist (because the organist is pregnant). 2 weeks ago, Shannon was not doing well, but played the prelude. Then, just before the meeting started, she stepped out, and I hopped on the organ and played the first two hymns. As I sat down, I told the bishopric that we were doing "tag-team organ". Shannon came back just before the second hymn and played the closing hymn.

Fall Colors

Being conference this weekend, I felt a natural desire to head for a canyon and look for fall colors. Two problems with this: first, we live in St. George where there are no majestic mountains and canyons a handful of miles away. Second, we live in St. George, where fall colors aren't around in early October.

But, we went for a cruise anyway. As far as canyons, we do have Snow Canyon near by, but it costs money (5 bucks to go once and 70 bucks for the year I think, which is ridiculous). We do live 45 minutes from Zion Canyon and 3 hours from the Grand Canyon, but those were a bit outside our intended driving range. So instead we went to Coral Canyon, which isn't so much a canyon as a large subdivision in Washington. But we were able to find a few trees, that if you looked closely, had a few hints of color.

- We have cylinders of liquid nitrogen here at work that are the brand name "dura-cyl". Cute.

- Bean counters are . . . so much fun to work with. I have to do a limited amount of bean counting here at work, and it's always a bit of a trial. It's not that bean counters are necessary or are deliberately difficult or something, it's that we speak such different languages. They view their bean counting as super important, while I don't. Deep down I know it is important, but I have such a hard time caring. Mostly, it's not too bad, once we've spent half an hour trying to figure out what the other person is even talking about.

- Yesterday I got to teach a Ph.D. from the U of U how to lock and unlock the front door here at work. Yes, I'll be using this for material for months to come.

More Wombsly

These things are piling up faster than I can scan them. So, here is the large-format picture we had taken Saturday night (it's like a 6"x8"). I'm leaving one smaller glossy from this morning for Shannon to post, and I'm just going to spare you the picture (yes, picture) of the heart beat, because there really isn't anything to look at. (It was 150bpm.)


I'm particularly grateful that they were nice enough to label the head, body and leg. My favorite part is that you can see little Wombsly's jaw bones.