No Let's Yeah | irrelevantly irreverent

Every year, countless brackets are filled out for the NCAA tournament. But what are the odds of predicting the outcome of every game?

In short, staggeringly impossible.

From a purely mathmatical standpoint, you would find this answer by taking 2 to the 63rd power, because there are 63 games in the tournament, and only two outcomes in each game. To even come close to a perfect bracket, you’d have to fill out more than 9.2 quintillion brackets. That’s a 9 followed by 18 zeros. It’s a staggering number. Just look at it:

9,200,000,000,000,000,000

It doesn’t take a mathematician to know that the actual odds are smaller. However, that magic number is difficult to pinpoint. For example, a #1 seed will almost always beat a #16 seed, and same with the #2 and #15 seed games, giving you a sure bet most of the time, but only a few games in the first round are really lopsided. Plus, upsets happen every year, so even if you factor the seeding and rank of a team, we would still be looking at one very large digit.

Keep filling out those brackets…

Pine nuts are used in pesto dishes and many Mediterranean dishes. When toasted, they impart a nice flavor to other meat and vegetable dishes. But are they really from pine trees? The appearance of the pine nut doesn’t necessarily hint at any relation to the tall evergreen tree found around the world in northern climates.

Well, the answer is yes. Pine nuts are the seed found inside pine cones.

At the store, pine nuts may have high price tags, due to the high cost of processing. Today at the local supermarket, pine nuts were going for $20/lb. Luckily, most dishes do not require a full pound of pine nuts. Even a small amount can add a nice touch to your dish.

I don’t typically make claims like this, but of all the creative, interesting videos out there on the Internet, this may be the top dog. Watch and be amazed. Via Booooooom

Composite and simulation by Markely Boyer; photograph by Arthus-Bertrand/Corbis

When I roam around cities, a reoccurring thought often visits me: What did this landscape look like before a city grew here?

At a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, you can gain insight into what Manhattan looked like 400 years ago. I learned of this exhibit from an article in the NY Times, and now I want to see something like this for more cities around the world, including where I live, Seattle.

National Fist Bump Day.

“On June 3rd, 2008, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle took part in what immediately became known as “the fist bump heard ’round the world.” Though it was an intensely personal and affectionate gesture of love and respect at a pivotal moment in Obama’s presidential campaign, it firmly placed the fist bump on the national stage.”

From MetaFilter.

There are people who think that everything happens for a reason, and then there are people who only believe in meaningless coincidence.

I tend to err on the side of the former. Every day we make thousands of little tiny decisions that sculpt our day-to-day actions. Sometimes, the unexpected happens and we are forced to make on-the-fly decisions, leading us down a path that we never expected. These are the moments that I love, and this exact thing happened to me on Tuesday.

Rode my bike to work on Tuesday, and on the way home, as I was enjoying a sunny NW afternoon, I had to go out of my way to avoid hitting an older man walking on the path ahead of me. This caused me to ride over a rough road/train track combination that immediately deflated my rear tire.

Bike ride: OVER.

I started walking up Eighth Avenue in Ballard. I was a mile away from home, and when I paused at the nearest bus stop to see when the next 28 bus was going to cruise by, I calculated my options.

1. Walk home
2. Call Ellen, make her come get me
3. Wait for bus.

Before I could decide on any of these, the bus showed up. Problem solved. I loaded my bike on the front rack and climbed aboard.

Immediately I heard “JACE!”

It was a former coworker and friend, Bart. I haven’t chatted with Bart in a long time, and have been meaning to check out his band, but I keep missing the opportunities.

As we talked, I thought about how strange it was that the only reason I was sitting there talking to Bart was because I rode my bike to work, and chose to leave work at a particular time, to take a particular bus back across Lake Washington, and then ride down the Burke-Gilman trail in the sunshine, only to avoid a slow-moving man near the Ballard Fred Meyer, where I deflated my tire on a train track.

You may believe in coincidence, but I felt like some cosmic force wanted me to see Bart on that bus.

The same cosmic force cost me $15 for a new bike tube.

UPDATE: Listen to the podcast that sparked this whole thing.

Have you heard of the Snuggie?

The Snuggie is a blanket with sleeves. If you own a TV and watch it somewhat regularly, you have probably seen the irritating commercials for this product. If you want to waste two minutes of your life, and do not value your time whatsoever, take a minute and watch it now.

Now we’re up to speed.

Get this: the Snuggie phenomenon has sparked a pub crawl, where people wear their Snuggies while hopping from bar to bar.

Okay. But why? Just because it would be ironic and kitschy?

Please. Stop the irony. This form of humor has saturated our jokes and reached a level of ubiquity where it is no longer fresh and original. It is the lingua franca of boring.

Case in point: I needed a calendar for my cubicle. I went to a store with thousands of calendar choices. The store was called The Calendar Store. No irony in that store name at all. It’s brilliant. As I browsed around, my first thought was to get something ironic, like a kitten calendar. It would make everyone at work have a good laugh… for a week. But then what? I’d be looking at kittens for the next 365 days. I bagged the idea and picked up a calendar featuring old photos of New York City. Classy.

I dislike irony. But the hate will stop there. I may be tired of irony, but I’m also tired of people spouting hate about things they dislike. I like to turn negatives into positives. Rather than continue with the hate, let me make a constructive suggestion to all Snuggie pub crawlers:

Please, for the sake of my TV viewing, do not support the company that makes Snuggies. TV has enough irritating commercials that interrupt my weekly LOST episodes. I do not want to see more Snuggie ads. I want you to understand that I am very pro-fun and very supportive of doing weird and harmless things in public, but for the love of Ron Popeil, do something else.

Suggestions for Public Acts of Weirdness:
1. Gather a large group of people and start a dance party at a busy street corner. Better yet, start with one person, and build that as your group walks by and notices what’s happening. See if you can get people outside of your group to join in.

2. Keep the pub crawl idea, but stagger the arrival time for each person. The first person goes in, orders a drink, sits down. Second person comes in, acts like he wasn’t expecting first person to be there, and is really excited that he randomly ran into an old friend. Second person joins first person. Third person walks in, repeats this process. You could do this all night, in many forms. Have fun with it. When everyone is there, you can decide which pub to try next. Really be sure that people around you are listening to these “chance” encounters.

3. Repeat #1 in a bar or inside another public establishment.

4. Glue quarters down to the floor of a busy store. Sit back and watch. This is one of my personal favorites.

5. Do something like these people.

If you get video of any of this stuff, I will be happy to post it right here. Go, and do good work. Leave the Snuggie at home.

Back in 1999, a man in NYC stepped onto an elevator and became trapped for 41 hours. The New Yorker has a video of this up at their site. It’s a humbling thing to watch… 41 compressed hours of madness. How long is your average elevator ride? Likely seconds, and rarely longer than a minute (then again, I don’t live in NYC). It’s a matter of expectations, really. Nicolas White got on the elevator expecting a short ride, but was instead confined for 41 hours. This is worth a watch.

The video and the accompanying story.