Lesson 3 of my Learn Latin series is posted, introducing the verb sum (I am) and one use of the ablative case.  Enjoy, and as always, feel free to discuss or ask questions here.

In other news:

My wife Angel just started a blog of her own.  I don’t know what all she’ll be writing about, but she’s a good writer, so go check it out.  Her article on driving through the Alps in her tiny blue car (which you might have seen around Quincy) is both funny and interesting.

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After I wrote my Mahjong Safari Strategy Guide, I got to wondering how the different boards really did compare. (If you’re not interested in this game or nerdy statistics, sorry, come back tomorrow.) Certain ones seemed better for scoring than others, but subjective impressions are often unreliable. Real numbers aren’t, so I kept track of my scores for a while. I only kept track of ten games on each board, so it’s not a very large sample, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

(Click the graph on the right to see it full-sized.) There’s a blue square for each score, and the line represents the averages. As you can see, there were big differences between the different layouts. Some things I guessed right about: the three highest scoring boards were three with long straight spaces through the layout. HH and Jail are also that way, though, and they didn’t score as well. They’re just a bit more congested than the others. I was surprised to see Eye so high. In retrospect I realize that it’s not as congested as it looks; if you get a few pieces cleared out of the center, it opens up quickly. Desert is the same way: a couple of early breaks make it much easier. Lightbulb was the biggest surprise; I didn’t think I did that well on it at all.

I was surprised to see Windows so low; that’s one of my favorites to play, and I thought I usually did pretty well at it. Not so much, it turns out, in these ten tries anyway. The 4-5 worst ones are all very poor for scoring, and you can see that the first three resulted in a lot of “stuck” games that weren’t possible to finish at all. If you’re looking for high scores and plenty of Pogo tokens, you should probably skip those first five every time they come up. To really maximize your scores, stick with the top three layouts and just mix in some of the others for variety.

….for every time I stood in line behind some #^$%@ buying a lottery ticket….  Thank God for pay-at-the-pump.

Recently I wrote that lotteries are a tax on the innumerate (clueless at math), which may have insulted some people, so I thought I’d explain.  While many lottery players are spending money they really can’t afford, I know others who are well-off, who say, “Hey, I can afford a few bucks a week, so why is it any worse than buying a movie ticket or a magazine, if I have fun?”

But is it really that much fun?  Wouldn’t gambling on almost anything else—football games, poker, the weather—be more entertaining?  Watch the Kentucky Derby; now those people look like they’re having fun.

The usual response to that is, “Yeah, but with those things I can’t win big.  I know my odds of winning the lottery are a lot lower (massive understatement), but if I do win, it’ll change my life.  I can’t win millions betting on football games.”

And that’s where the innumeracy comes in, because your chances of becoming a millionaire are actually better with betting on football games, or almost anything else.  The numbers are just so big that people can’t get a handle on them to compare.

The Powerball, which I guess is the biggest lottery around here, is currently at a cash value of $12.5M, and the odds of winning are 1 in 146,107,962.  Now, let’s look at football games.  To keep this simple, we’ll assume you’re betting the point spread, nothing fancy, so you have a 50% chance on each game.  If you win, you double your money; if you lose, you’re out.  Start with one dollar and keep re-betting your winnings on the next game.  How long would it take to pass 12 millon dollars?

Well, one game gives you $2, two wins gives you $4, three gives you $8, and so on.  Keep doubling, and you’ll find that after 24 wins, you’ll have $16,777,216.  Bet one game on Sunday and one on Monday, and you’ll be a millionaire 2/3 of the way through the season—if you’re lucky.

At this point, most people will say, “Yeah, but there’s no way you could pick 24 games right in a row!  That’s not just improbable like the lottery; it’s impossible!”  Oh really?  Well, the odds of winning twenty-four 50-50 bets in a row are 1 in 16,777,216.  So you’re 8.7 times more likely to be able to win 24 football bets in a row than you are to win the lottery.  Looked at from the other direction, the odds of winning the Powerball are just a bit worse than the odds of winning 27 football bets in a row.

The problem is that we can’t really feel numbers that big, so we focus on the ones we can handle: one lottery ticket is easier to win than 24 straight football bets, right?  Well, no, it’s a lot harder to win with that one ticket, but it’s hard for us to accept that.  The numbers don’t lie, though.

So, the next time you feel like gambling a dollar, bet on something that’s actually fun and holds a better chance of winning, and stop holding up people behind you who just want to pay for their gas and get moving.