I’m not a dedicated follower of football, so it was only today that I learned that “taking a knee” had a meaning specific to the playing of the game, long before it came to denote a symbolic expression of protest.
For those who don’t know, it’s a way for the winning team, in the last minutes of a close game and when in possession of the ball, to simply not play and thereby avoid the risk of the other team gaining possession and possibly scoring. After the snap the quarterback simply “takes a knee” rather than passing or running with the ball.
The house a few houses down has a duck pond. Every spring mallard ducks and Canada geese make it their home. A few summers ago I was watching the ducks paddle around the pond and noticed that I seemed to see only female ducks. I thought maybe the males left once breeding was over. Being curious, I went home and googled mallard ducks. I found out that the male ducks molt their beautiful green/blue feathers in the summer around the time the females are laying eggs. This is so they are camouflaged during the summer AND they aren’t able to fly during this process. Then in the fall they molt again and get their pretty feathers back so they can find a mate for next year.
I had no idea. Mother Nature amazes me all the time!
Some years ago I wanted to fly from Phoenix to San Jose and, too lazy to look them up, punched in the codes PHX and SJO. I was startled that the cheapest round trip air fare was over $600.
Turned out SJO was San José, Costa Rica. I wanted SJC and the fare was a more reasonable $120.
I’ve had a steep driveway (New England, so it snows), uphill to the road, where it was long enough that you definitely need sand and salt to get out but short enough that if you could get a good enough jump in the bottom flat part you could shoot up to the road and stop just short. Could be scary, but usually just a lot of swerving back and forth to get past the steep part and then it’s thawed by the time you come home from work. Front wheel drive a must.
A buddy of mine’s parents back in high school had a very steep and long driveway that was downhill to the road. That has to be so much worse, careening uncontrollably into the street on a sheet of ice. I can only imagine that means you never get to chance it, but have to inspect the driveway on foot before getting in your car. Yuck.
The one thing I’d say in favor of a steep driveway down to the road is that you probably never have to worry about flooding.
I should add I live in NC so snow and ice are not really a problem here. I just bought a house with a sloped driveway but it’s not steep. I really liked a house but the driveway sloped to the house so water can be a problem there. It’s on the market 90 days which is not a surprise.
TBH, the first one may not be a fail. I mean, a garage door can be used for non-garage applications, right? For example some restaurants have them and when the weather’s nice…
https://images.app.goo.gl/sCxAZaG4Qo4UdwXf6
My contribution for today: the number of possible unique games of chess is bigger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
Shannon number - Wikipedia (I had to add the ^ because copy/paste isn’t showing superscripts.) The article also states:
My favorite along these lines is that the number of possible orderings of a deck of cards is, of course, 52!, which is 8.0658*10^67. Which is still too big to mean anything to most people.
But here’s a way that helps comprehend it:
Set a timer showing three significant digits to count down 52! seconds (that’s 8.06×10^67 seconds)
From a designated spot on the equator, and take one step forward every billion years
When you’ve circled the earth once, take a drop of water from the Pacific Ocean (which you have walled off from the other oceans, and protected from rain), and keep going
When the Pacific Ocean is empty, lay a sheet of paper down, refill the ocean, and start over from step 2.
When your stack of paper reaches the sun, take a look at the timer.
The timer will be unchanged, still showing 8.06×10^67 seconds left to go. You would need four significant digits on the timer to see a difference.
Repeat the whole process 1000 times to get 1/3 of the way through that time.
5.385×10^67 seconds left to go.
So to kill that time you try something else.
Shuffle a deck of cards, deal yourself 5 cards every billion years
Each time you get a royal flush, buy a lottery ticket with jackpot odds of one in ten million
Each time that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand in the grand canyon
When the grand canyon’s full, take 1oz of rock off Mount Everest, empty the canyon and start over from step 1.
When Everest has been leveled, check the timer.
There’s barely any change. 5.364×10^67 seconds left.
ETA: I like to whip this out when creationists (or “Intelligent Design” ists) quote odds about a protein sequence forming, saying it’s only one chance in 10^35 or whatever. By thoroughly shuffling a deck of cards, in 30 seconds you can produce a sequence much more improbable than that.
a new idea in Math was invented around WW 2, linear programming. From wikipedia:
Dantzig’s original example was to find the best assignment of 70 people to 70 jobs. The computing power required to test all the permutations to select the best assignment is vast; the number of possible configurations** exceeds the number of particles in the observable universe**. However, it takes only a moment to find the optimum solution by posing the problem as a linear program and applying the simplex algorithm. The theory behind linear programming drastically reduces the number of possible solutions that must be checked.
I had the Mad magazine and flexi disc record that came with it that’s mentioned in that Wiki page when I was a kid. That song “It’s a Super-Spectacular Day” is still in my head after all these years.
