Musical Gems - Stoned

I'm in a musical mood this week, so here's another gem.  This one is by the Canadian band, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings.  I ran across this song 10 to 15 years ago when I was listening to Pandora.  It's a catchy tune with some nice guitar playing.

The band consists of Stephen Fearing, Colin Linden, and Tom Wilson, all of whom play guitar.

This song is from their 2003 album, BARK.  The lead singer for this song is Tom Wilson.  His deep voice is key to the song's appeal.  Listen to the song below.  Beware that the video is a bit weird, but the music is great!

What are the Odds? - Part 2

Back in July 2009, I noted that a man in Serbia, Radivoje Lajic, had just experienced the sixth meteorite impact on his home.  Mr. Lajic concluded that aliens were targeting his domicile.  I suggested that the odds of this happening by chance were about one-in-one quadrillion and concluded that one could not reject his hypothesis on purely statistical grounds.  It turns out I probably overstated the odds.

A coworker of mine, Aaron Betz, recently sent me an article in Wired from 2013 that gave the odds of being hit by any given meteorite at one-in-3,921,910,064,328.  The math can be found here.  Now this is only the probability for a single meteorite and literally thousands of objects impact the Earth's atmosphere every year.  However, best estimates are that only about 500 or so are large enough to leave a substantial meteorite.  If the typical person lives to age 80 that lowers the odds of having your home hit by a meteorite sometime during your lifetime to one-in-3379.  The probablility of being hit six times is 1:1.488 septillion (1.488E+24).  So, yes, the aliens are trying to kill the poor man!

On a related note, a man from Ohio, Gregg Nigl, managed the first perfect prediction for the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament.  If the odds of any team winning a game in the tournament were 50/50 then the odds of pulling off Mr. Nigl's feat with a random guess would be 1:281 trillion.  The odds of a perfect prediction of all 63 games would be 1:9.223 quintillion (9.223E+18).

Of course the odds for any given game are NOT 50/50, so a perfect bracket is not as unlikely as that.  But still,...  Duke mathemetician, Jonathan Mattingly, has taken this into account an calculates that the odds of a perfect bracket are about 1:2.4 trillion, or about 3.8 million times more likely than the 50/50 odds.

Now you might think that these are really long odds, but lots and lots of people are filling out NCAA brackets each year so the odds of at least one of these people getting a perfect bracket must be pretty high.  Well there are 7.5 billion people in the world.  If each person in the world filled out a different bracket, then the odds of a perfect bracket amoung those 7.5 billion entries is 1:320.  Put another way, it would take 160 years of NCAA tournaments before the odds of a perfect bracket rise to 50 percent.  So don't hold your breath waiting.

For comparison purposes the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot on any given drawing are 1:292,201,338.

To summarize:

• You are 8200 times more likely to win the Powerball jackpot than you are to fill out a perfect NCAA bracket.
• You are 620 million times more likely to fill out a perfect bracket than you are to have your home hit by a meteorite six times.

Relative Sizes of Astronomical Objects

If Earth were the width of a hair, the sun would be 1 cm across and 1.2 meters away. Alpha Centauri would be 200 miles away. The Milky Way would be 10 times larger than the moon's orbit around the earth. The visible universe would be 3/4 of a light year across.

Here's the math.

Musical Gems - Something Good Coming

Tom Petty died on October 2nd, 2017.  He was one of America's most prolific singer\songwriters with a stretch of hits running from the late seventies up to his death.  He was the driving force behind Tom Petty and Heartbreakers and a member of the 1980's supergroup, The Traveling Wilburys.

He had a knack of putting together songs with catchy melodies and thought-provoking lyrics.  Something Good Coming from the Heartbreaker's 2010 Album, Mojo, is a good example.

Musical Gems - Pride (In the Name of Love)

Today's musical gem is, in my opinion, the quintessential U2 song.  This song has it all: solid catchy rhythm section from Adam Clayton on bass and Larry Mullen on drums, great vocals by Bono, and that signature delay and reverb from The Edge on lead guitar.  If I could only listen to one U2 song from now until the end of forever, this would be the one I'd choose.

Pride (In the Name of Love) was released in 1984 on The Unforgettable Fire album.  The lyrics are intentionally vague, but it's clear even to dense people like myself that the song is about Martin Luther King Jr.  The Unforgettable Fire was U2's fourth studio album and came between their breakout album, War, and their monster hit album, Joshua Tree.  Other great songs from this album are: A Sort of Homecoming, The Unforgettable Fire, and Bad.

Musical Memory Bank - Countdown

Today's muscial gem is a song from 1982 by the Canadian progressive rock band, Rush.  This one comes from the album, Signals.  The album also included the songs "New World Man" and "Subdivisions", which recieved a lot of airplay and are firmly established in most Best-of-Rush song lists.

Countdown is about the first launch of the space shuttle, Columbia, on April 12, 1981.  The two astronauts on board were John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen.  The members of Rush had front row seats and watched the launch from a VIP area at the Kennedy Space Center.