Bridge

WARNING: MATHEMATICAL CONTENT!

As I approach my 'toughest' final of the week (a bridge tournament), I thought I'd share some numbers with you.

A bridge hand consists of 13 cards from a standard 52 card deck. There are 635,013,559,600 hands you can be dealt while playing bridge. You would have to play 24,836,748 hands per day to play every bridge hand over the course of 70 years - that's 287 hands per second.

There are 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 possible hands to be played by the whole table. That amounts to 82,472,935,650,000,000,000 hands a second, played since the earth was created around 4.54 billion years ago.

You have a 566,976 times better chance of being struck by lightning than getting a hand with all of one suit. Surprisingly, you are just slightly more likely to be struck by lightning twice than to get this hand.

You have a .2% chance of having all of the aces, a .00017% chance you'll have all the kings to go along with it, and a .00000000006% chance the queens will join the party. If it is any consolation, you have a 98.7% chance of having at least one of those cards.

Figure this one out:

A large sign in the library says:


Looking for a computer?
Go to: http://labs.uwec.edu/OpenSeats/index.asp


You don't have to be a math major to scratch your head at that one...

A Long Overdue Post

I'll tell ya, not much happens around here. I had two hours to kill before a meeting, so I decided I'd write a blog post, but I got side tracked trying to figure out the location of a point inside a square which maximizes the length of the four lines connecting that point to the squares corners. I didn't really need the fancy computer software I was using: of course it occurs in the four corners. Though a 3-d graph of the values would be kind of nifty. I digress.

I got my first fungal infection, and I suppose that's news to write home about! Everybody tells you that if you don't wear shoes in the showers you'll get all sorts of funk on ya feet, but I acquired my massive fungal infestation on my thigh! It has now spread in little splotches all over my body, after my home remedy fungal ointment proved ineffective, and I spent another five precious days treating a non-existent bacterial infection, per doctors orders. But now my guns are effectively loaded, and the enemy stands no chance.

Final are coming up. Finals week is referred to as "the dead hours", or "dead week" and, in fact, there was even a lengthy article about attempted suicide in the school newspaper. I am happy to report that the prospect of finals week has not brought me to suicide. In fact, it seems to me that a week in which you only have to go to class 2 hours a day is a most desirable week. Granted, 30% of your grade rides on that class, but you have plenty of time to study, and that is an understatement. I have already eyed up a good selection of books in the library (mostly children's books, a genre that I have been delving in to more and more as the "academic" books I am required to read leave me sorely disappointed in "sophisticated" thinking).

And other than that, I am quite out of things to write about, though I should mention that I'm quite glad we are in Year C now, and Luke (my second favorite Gospel, next to John) is the Gospel for the next 50 Sundays!

UPDATE: HERE'S TODAY'S WAY COOL MATH PICTURE!

The square measured here has a side length of 10. the two lower axes measure the distance of the point from one of the vertical sides one of the horizontal sides. The vertical axis shows the measure of the segments connecting the point to the corners of the square. Maximum occurs at (10,10, 53.77), though (10,0,38.10) gives a surprising run for it's money! Oh! Maybe this is the next one: find the point at which z/(a+b) is greatest. But of course! (0,0,EXPLOSION!) I'll stop the math humor while I'm not too far behind.