My friend, also named Matt, spotted a person downtown Montreal with a shirt that said, “Saskatchewan: Hard to Spell, Easy to Draw” – what a cool shirt!
Now, for you geography buffs, you’ll know that Saskatchewan is not really defined by 4 straight lines, because on the border to Manitoba there are jagged steps which makes the drawing a little less easy, but I’m sure a little simplification here wouldn’t hurt…
YVR > SJC - kind of a zany concept but it works relatively well, not a great boxing movie but not too bad.
0.3
This movie came well recommended to me and it was a good, strange and profanity laced comedy. The main character was profound, confusing and yet remarkably consistent and believable. Some good lines in there and a nice change of pace from an action movie loaded with action to this one which seems to try to avoid it at every turn.
0.3
When a movie with a plot as benign as MLB drafting and trading using statistics instead of scouting intuition is this entertaining, you know they did something right. Great story that had both Heidi and I riveted to a sport that we really know and care very little about.
0.3
MSP > YVR - Solid acting in this action-drama, decent story, pretty good fight scenes and sympathetic characters. All in all, nicely done.
0.3
Ugh, this Christian movie was not worth watching. While it followed the plot of the Prodigal Son story closely, it seemed to lack all the great details that we had been learning about in the Prodigal God book study that we were going through. The acting was poor, most of the characters were poorly developed and the dialog was very local (to Texas) and didn't sound very natural to my Canadian ears.
0.3Towing the party line. I always thought that meant that you’re a beast of burden carrying the ideals of the party along with you – this is another thing I’ve always believed that is, in fact, incorrect.
Toeing the party line is the correct idiomatic expression which is believed to have been started in British House of Commons. Back when politicians attended their meet-ups armed with swords, they had two lines that were a swords length apart to prevent random stabbings.
Another interesting thing that you can pretend you knew and laugh at me for not knowing…
Us and Heidi’s parents took a little ride down to upstate NY for a scenic hike through Ausable Chasm. The drive down was nice but the border was a bit long each way (~45 minutes each). The hike was really picturesque and very comfortable; it’s not quite in high season so the rafting option wasn’t available but almost everything else was available. I had a good time carrying Saff but didn’t love that she enjoyed straight legging me right in the back – not so comfortable.
So Heidi’s parents were/are out and her Dad was able to do a nice job changing the look of our front yard – it looks so much better now. Too bad I didn’t get a decent before picture so you could see how much better, so I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.
So, good SNL skits don’t come along too often but I find this one so funny! I love snickerdoodles, the pee bit, “If I gave up everytime I peed my pants out of fear, I would not be married, I would not have 3 of my 4 kids, and I definitely wouldn’t be starting here in front of you right now” also the music! The music was so great – I was wondering if that was just house band music but I found out it’s the theme music from the original Casino Royale by Herb Alpert – awesome!
So I’m pretty sure that this entry is only going to be interesting to me, but I guess that’s why this is MY blog!
I was craving a little mental exercise to do, so when I posted the Can’t Stop game a few weeks ago there were a plethora of things to start thinking about.
First, I wanted to know what the highest probability you could get would be and what the numbers were, so I made an Excel spreadsheet and found that 6, 7 & 8 are the best numbers and they give you a 92% chance of getting one of those 3 numbers with 4 die. What is the worst? If you need the numbers 2, 12 & (11 or 3) you only a 44% chance of getting one of those numbers with 4 die.
That was fun to figure out but I wanted something where I didn’t have to make a spreadsheet and crunch numbers out – I wanted a real formula. So, to get a real formula, I first had to come up with a real problem. The problem I came up with was to find the probability of rolling at least two 1′s with ‘n’ number of die.
Now, for 2 die, that’s pretty easy to figure out, it’s 1 chance in 6 for the first dice (has to be a 1) and 1 chance in 6 for the second dice (it also has to be a 1) for a total probability of 1 in 36 or 2.8%.
When we have 3 die, there gets to be a little kink in the solution… When you have a 1, 1, X (X is any number) or a 1, X, 1 or a X, 1, 1 – these are all valid so you would think that you have (6+6+6)/216 (where 216 is the total number of rolls that you can have with 3 die) for a total of 8.3% which is better than with 2 die but not quite correct because of ‘the kink’. The problem is that you’ve counted the combination 1, 1, 1 three times instead of just 1 time as it should be, so you should really have (6*3-2)/216 for a total of 7.4% which is correct.
The combinations that you start to count twice get a lot more complicated as you start adding more die to the mix giving the need for my precious formula which I found to be:
And, if I plug in the numbers for 3 die (n=3), I get the same answer – awesome!
I want to try this now for 4 die and see if it matches what I got from the manual method with Excel (result was 13.2%).
It does, one more check with 5 die and I’ve verified my results again (Excel said 19.6%).
With 6 die you’re really pushing the limits of manual calculation with Excel because I would need to have 46656 lines; it would be possible but also pretty time consuming. I plugged it into my formula to find that it gives me a realistic result of 26.3%.
If I wanted to check the probability with 7 die (it’s 33.0%), I would not be able to do that in Excel anymore as it can’t take a spreadsheet that size, so I would have to have a formula if I wanted to do that. Thank goodness I do!
For snake eyes, this wasn’t too complex to do; but if someone wanted to try it for rolling a 7 – that would get pretty hairy indeed. I can’t believe that you read this far – you’re such a geek too!
If, like me, you’ve missed having Seinfeld around for the last few years, be happy because there are a bunch of short new videos of him promoting his new movie, Bee Movie.
The Bruins were hot off a 5 game win streak and the Canadiens were 1 win in their last 4 so it was a bit surprising to see the Habs beat the Bruins so handily. I don’t think that they played well enough to warrant a margin that wide but they did deserve the win.
Defensively, they had trouble handling the puck all game, giveaways were a big problem but the Bruins were not able to convert on very many of these gifted opportunities. I personally enjoyed the pretzel that I won, having tickets before the game, booing Chara and parking for free – oh, the weather has been nice too, so that’s good.
If you’ve ever been tempted to burn some time and start checking off the free cell games that you have completed – don’t bother, it has already been done. Some computer geniuses have gone through and figured out that there are about 8 games (on the modern Windows install) that are unsolvable (really, I thought all games were solvable!?!? Wrong!)
I was thinking about playing the game Can’t Stop that I used to play when I was a kid – It was a simple game but still a lot of fun. I don’t actually own the game but it’s really simple, so I made up a board that you can print on an 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper and then just use pennies and dimes or something like that as markers. If you don’t know the rules, they’re outlined on the wikipedia page – have fun!
