Fun with math

(Late post tonight as I just made my way back from Elvis Costello. Because, as in the words of WXRT, "If your Elvis is dead, try ours." Not a bad show, though Elvis was fighting off a cold and he really needs to be in good voice for his material to work. Good set, though. Hem opened and if you want to know just how deep into the alt country music scene I am, I actually knew who they were before they took the stage. When you read that the opening act is Hem and you go, "Oh yeah, that band from Brooklyn" it means that you spend way too much time reading No Depression. Anyway, on to our theme for the week.)

I think I actually beat the guy who did the calculation on "Number of women I could go out with" by a number of years. Back in college, I sat at dinner with two of my buddies (a mechanical engineer and a chemical engineer, and yes, all three of us wore glasses) and we calculated the number of women on the Illinois campus who would go out with me. After a number of steps, including a huge discount rate just for the fact of "Who would want to date an electrical engineer", the consensus was that on a campus of 34,000 students there was a grand total of 14 women who would go out with me. As I sat there stunned at the logic and the final number my buddy Patsy said one of the greatest lines of all time...

"You know, half of those girls are probably fat so the real answer is more like seven."

(Though in retrospect if that truly was the case at least I found the majority of them...)

This probably will not make sense from a guy who really does view the world in terms of percentages but if there is one place where I try to forget numbers it is in the realm of relationships. I found this out in college, if I sat down and tried to figure out where a relationship would go and just what I should do when to create a certain result all I could guarantee was that it would never work out that way. In fact, it would fail in the most brilliant manner possible. Of course, I still make the same mistakes, but at least I'm aware of them.

(Today was another 2.8. It's just been one of those weeks.)