They're gonna stop having the sun so you better get tan now
bunny_hugger and I were at Motor City Furry Con most of the weekend, report to follow in excruciating detail, but we were at a coney island (a diner) while Michigan State's game Sunday was winding up. The coney island had the game on its TV sets, but somehow screwed up the aspect ratio so the game's score and the game clock were obscured. Occasionally the scoreboard would flash in the middle as they went to commercial, but mostly, we had to follow the game by our estimates of how close they probably were and how much time it seemed likely was left, reasoning stuff like ``Michigan State must be up by five points or so, because Louisville's making a lot of three-point attempts''.
This was wonderfully suspenseful, though: Michigan State got up six points in overtime, but we had no idea how long overtime lasted, or how much time was left. They were up by six points with seconds to go, and the game all but decided, but we could just guess this was a good situation to be in but not nearly secure. Then we looked away a moment (the waitress asked if we wanted anything else) and then we saw all these Michigan State players hugging one another and people milling on the court, and that's how we knew the game had ended and bunny_hugger had leapt to the top of our March Madness pool. (I'm in second place.) She's already secured wins over seven of the ten people in the group, too, so the actual Final Four is a safe thing for her forecasting reputation.
And my mathematics blog has continued at a surprisingly rapid pace. It's been a busy month, somehow. If you've not added it to your Friends page (I know you haven't) or to your RSS reader (do they still make RSS readers?) here's the most recent set of articles:
- Reading the Comics, March 15, 2015: Pi Day Edition, which is where the last roundup let off, back on the dimly remembered day of the 17th of March.
- Pi Day With A Friend who was on a Washington, DC, local morning news show to talk about pi.
- How Interesting Is A Basketball Tournament? which turns out to be 63.
- Reading the Comics, March 22, 2015: Word Problems Edition, as there was not so much pi and more story problems this time around.
- Reading the Comics, March 26, 2015: Kind Of Hanging Around Edition, some more mathematics comics without any really great themes, more's the pity.
- What We Talk About When We Talk About How Interesting What We’re Talking About Is, continuing the college basketball tournament as a way of introducing information theory; here, I fill in some vocabulary.
- But How Interesting Is A Real Basketball Tournament? and I figure that it's probably not 63 and is more likely somewhere around 48.
Trivia: 56 of 61 American war films released between May and November 1942 showed no deaths in combat.
Source: Why The Allies Won, Richard Overy.
Currently Reading: A History Of Money, E Victor Morgan.