Fun with Probability and Football

I came across an item on cnn.com sports/sports illustrated: "Predict the exact NFL standings and win $1 million." At first this sounded pretty hard, but maybe not impossible. But then I started to do a little math.

Suppose we knew nothing about football and chose our standings at random. How many possible combinations are there? Each division has 4 teams, so the standings in each division can turn out 4*3*2*1=24 different ways. There are eight divisions. Therefore there are 24 raised to the 8th power possible ways the standings can turn out. That's 110,075,314,176 ways, which is more than even a math nerd like me would have guessed. 110 billion. There are only about 80 million combinations in the Powerball lottery, so the likelihood of randomly guessing the NFL standings is less than 1/1000th that of winning Powerball.

Of course our guesses wouldn't be completely random: we know a little football. Quantifying that is pretty difficult, though. Suppose for each division we knew for certain where one team would finish. This is unrealistic, obviously, because in reality we don't have 100% information on one team and none on the rest -- we have a little information on them all. Still, it seems to me to be approximately the right amount of information overall. If we're spotted that one team per division's finishing order, the number of combinations for the rest drops way down to 1,679,616. If you win $1 million for every 1,679,616 times you play, that's about 60 cents per play. If it takes you 5 minutes to fill out your picks, you're making $7.20 per hour, which is about what they pay at our nation's largest employer, Walmart, and it comes with a similar healthcare plan.

Unfortunately I clicked the link to the contest and discovered some fine print. Not only do you have to predict the standings order, but also which teams go to the playoffs and the playoff results through the Superbowl. The odds of doing that are surely many thousands to one against, so it looks like you're better off at Walmart after all.

Snake Hype

I was wondering how I managed to be the only person in all of Morehead City even mildly interested in seeing Snakes on a Plane on the Saturday afternoon of its opening weekend. I had heard about all this Internet hype, but box office was disappointing across the country. It was no Blair Witch, though as a movie it was slightly less painful to sit through than Open Water.

Then it occured to me that I hadn't really heard any hype. All I'd heard was hype about the hype -- meta-hype! And now I'm wondering if there was really any hype at all. Maybe it was phony psuedo-meta-hype: the studio gets Sam Jackson to blather on in every interview about how the name of the film has created this Internet phenomenon that doesn't really exist. Given how stupid the media are, they probably bought it, though it doesn't seem to have helped put asses in the seats. Except my stupid ass.

Semester Begins

I had my first class by video link with Chapel Hill this afternoon. As far as the quality of the audio-visual experience nobody is going to mistake it for IMAX, but I guess it'll work out OK. Thankfully I don't have many more classes to take. It looks like I finally got things straightened out to take the class at Duke Marine Lab too.

I have a few leads on long-term places to live out here, so it's hard to believe that one of them won't pan out soon. One of them is a two-bedroom place half a block off the beach, but I can't see the inside until Sept 1, when the current residents move out. Frankly I should probably just rent it sight unseen; it's a beach house, it costs $600 a month and I can have a dog. How bad can it be?

I can see already that classes are going to interfere with my scuba diving schedule! I got a bunch of new gear, including a dive computer that just arrived today, and want to try it out, but I think I'll have to wait until next Friday to go out. Even that's not certain, since they need 4 people to run the boat and only 3 are signed up now. It seems like it's a choice between weekends when the boats are overcrowded, assuming you can even get on, and week days, when they may not even run. I need to start putting together a group of friends who want to dive regularly large enough so that the boat operators will take us when and where we want to go.

In world news, as of today Pluto is no longer a planet. Good riddance, I say! I've long been an anti-Plutite and can remember arguing with my best friend in junior high school, Mark Gordon, that it shouldn't be considered a planet. No, as it happens I didn't get many chicks in junior high. Why do you ask?

I finally bought those hair clippers, though not from Amazon, and gave myself my first self-administered buzz cut. There was only one small problem. Normally I get a cut with a "#3 guard," which I know is 3/8 inch. However for some reason I attached the 3/16 inch guard. I pretty much knew right away that I'd screwed up, but there's no turning back on these things.

Dolphin Wrangling Denied

The semester has snuck up on me! I had planned to go out dolphin wrangling* (the mammal type this time) with some folks from the NOAA lab in Beaufort on Thursday, but I realized over the weekend that classes start on Wednesday, so it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Classes this semester: seminar, estuarine processes, research hours, and hopefully a biological oceanography class at Duke Marine Lab. The processes for cross-registering for Duke classes is a little byzantine, however, and I haven't actually managed to do it yet. I'd like to go down to the registrar's office and kick some asses, but unfortunately I'm 160 miles from Chapel Hill.

* wrangling = capturing, examining, tagging, etc.

Movie Review: Snakes on a Plane

I was working Saturday afternoon and wanted to take a break, so I went down the street to see the much-hyped Snakes on a Plane, which just opened. Two things:

1) The movie sucked.
2) I was the only motherf&#(ing person in the motherf@^%ing theater.

Wow, I bet they sell a lot of these.

I was searching amazon.com for hair clippers so I could do my own buzz cuts (and maybe avoid surprise eyebrow trims) when I ran across this item. I'm sure it makes fascinating beach reading, but unfortunately I'm a little short of the $325.

The 2000 Import and Export Market for Shavers and Hair Clippers with Electric Motors and Parts in N. America & Caribbean (World Trade Report) (Ring-bound)

On the demand side, exporters and strategic planners approaching the market in N. America & Caribbean face a number of questions. Which countries are supplying shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts to N. America & Caribbean? What is the dollar value of these imports? How much do the imports of shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts vary from one country to another in N. America & Caribbean? Do exporters serving the market in N. America & Caribbean have similar market shares across the importing countries? On the supply side, N. America & Caribbean also sells to the international market of shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts. Which countries in N. America & Caribbean supply the most exports of shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts? Which countries are buying their exports? What is the value of these exports and which countries are the largest buyers?

This report was created for strategic planners, international marketing executives and import/export managers who are concerned with the market for shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts in N. America & Caribbean. With the globalization of this market, managers can no longer be contented with a local view...Icon Group has developed a proprietary methodology, based on macroeconomic and trade models, to estimate the market for shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts for those countries serving N. America & Caribbean via exports, or supplying from N. America & Caribbean via imports.

No Bull

Incidentally, on the topic of sharks, Steve, the instructor at Olympus Dive Shop I've been dealing with, told me that he and another of their employees spotted a bull shark when they were cleaning some fish at their dock the other night. This is a couple of miles down the road on the same waterfront where IMS is located, where I hooked what I believed to be a shark, and where I've been swimming at night. OK, I swam there once at midnight, when we were all pretty drunk. But I won't be doing that any more. Bull sharks aren't to be messed with. I would dive with them, cautiously, in good visibility, but I'd rather not swim with them in a murky estuary like Bogue Sound.

Update: apparently somebody actually landed a good-size bull shark on the Morehead City waterfront a couple of days ago.

More Scuba

I took off again yesterday to go diving and get my Nitrox certification (academic employment rocks). We initially went out the the Caribsea, a cargo ship torpedoed during WWII and well known as the residence of a group of sand tiger sharks, but visibility was poor, so we moved to the W.E. Hutton, also sunk by a U-boat. It was a pretty nice dive, shallower than the Caribsea, decent visibility, 30+ feet. Among other things we saw a couple of 6-foot sandbar sharks, one of which surprised me (and I him) when neither of us saw the other until we were just about in touching distance. They were very cool, though. Very active, fast-swimming sharks, unlike sand tigers, which just sort of hang out.

For our second dive we went back to the Indra. Visibility was good, 40 feet maybe. Much better than Friday, and we penetrated a very small distance into the wreck, swimming down through some large portholes into the lower deck.

I ordered a bunch of dive gear and it arrived today (actually early from UPS -- will wonders never cease??) I need to schedule another dive to check it out. I still need to buy a dive computer and a wet suit.

Scuba

I took off Friday and went scuba diving for the first time in years. We went to the Indra, a ship that was sunk deliberately in 70 feet of water as part of the artificial reef program. It was a fairly unremarkable dive, but I had nearly forgotten how much fun diving was. I was so excited that I immediately signed up for a Nitrox diving class so that I can have more bottom time on the many deep wreck sites in the area. I had the classroom session and written exam Saturday, and Wednesday I'm going out for my first Nitrox dives. This is going to cost me a lot of money, since I have a lot of equipment that needs replacing.

Things have cooled off a lot, starting Saturday; yesterday and today have been just beautiful. I'm sure it will get hot again, but the cooling, combined with the fact that the undergraduate summer employees and students have just left, has created a premature but distinct and slightly melancholy feeling of the end of summer around here.

Goodbye to Jenessa, Trevor, Haley and the rest -- it was fun!

Hair today, more tomorrow.

I got a haircut today, and right in the middle of it, without so much as a how-do-you-do, this nutty hair cutter sticks a comb in my right eyebrow and runs the clipper over it, giving me my first eyebrow trim. Not only have I never been offered one (well, I guess I still haven't actually been "offered"), I've never even heard of it before.

Am I starting to get gross, old-man long hairs in my old age? You be the judge:

Wurmsorge

Just about the only thing I remember from my single semester of college German is that when you use a noun as an adjective to modify another noun (is there a name for this grammatical construct?) you squash the nouns together into a single word. In German you have a kitchencabinet. This can go on indefinitely: kitchencabinetdoorhandle. That's where words like schadenfreude come from.

So with (appropriately enough) Babel Fish's help I've invented a word for the feeling you get while fishing that you may have lost your bait: Wurmsorge, which as far as I can tell is the best translation for "worm worry."

Night Fishing

I went fishing last night with the visiting undergraduates, just off the pier here at IMS. I caught a little black drum, maybe 2 pounds. On the very last cast of the evening I hooked some sort of monster, almost certainly a shark, which took line off my reel and eventually broke me off. I never did get a look at it. I don't think I'll be doing any more midnight swimming out there for a while.

I've decided that there should be a word for the feeling you get while fishing that you may no longer have bait on your hook. Maybe a German word like schadenfreude or fahrvergnugen.