The Markives
21 November 02025: 30 Years Later
30 is an interesting number.
From my past life as a number theorist, it's significant as 2 x 3
x 5, the primorial of both 5 and 6. (That would be the
product of all primes less than or equal to the given number.)
From my current life as an applied probabilist, 30's noteworthy as
the payoff (to 1) on some of the worst bets at a craps table: the
one-roll bets that the next roll will be a 2 or a 12. These
bets have a house advantage of 13.89%--not quite keno-level bad,
but still two of the worst bets you'll find in a standard casino
with table games.
30 is, of course, the day of my birth, which (rightly) matters to
me more than to most people.
Today, 30 marks the number of years since Laurie's big car
accident. A lot has changed in that trilogy of decades--my
employer and her employer, for two--but we're still together and
still speaking to each other.
I might not have guessed that, had I been asked in 01995, but it's
worked out pretty well all around. And if no one asked then,
it's certainly because we had other concerns that were far more
important than the long-range future.
M-->
16 November 02025 (Happy birthday yesterday
and tomorrow!): Trash Talking Considered
Another D-III football regular season is in the books, and with it
another year of running up and down the visitor's sideline and
watching a lot of very different sidelines.
1. Engineering students trash-talk differently.
Not every student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
majors in engineering, but they all have to take 3 semesters of
calculus, including the football players. They seem to be
aware that not every football player does this. And so we get
insults like "If you showed them a derivative, they wouldn't know
what to do with it!" and "That guy's probably failing Remedial
College Algebra!"
There's a certain level of accuracy in both of those assumptions.
I was reminded of the following quote from
Dr.
John Sturgis on
Young Sheldon:
We'll be mocked by physicists, engineers,
even mathematicians. And they don't just say you're an
idiot... they prove
it.
That said, the boys from RHIT were a little
chattier than the average sideline is with the chain
gang. We got to talking briefly about what else I do at
Albion, and they were impressed by the fact that I work in
gambling mathematics. I gave an invited talk on
blackjack math at Rose several years ago, but it was before
any current football players would have been enrolled.
2. Ardently religious schools have
slightly better-behaved sidelines than more secular
colleges, but the relationship between spirituality and good
behavior isn't a simple one.
While we learned no new curse words from the Hope or
Calvin players or their coaches*, Calvin was a bit more
rambunctious, and a little more willing to taunt opposing
players specifically by number. One might have expected
differently.
It may have helped in both cases that the games weren't
remotely close, and favored the visiting sides.
This year's other visitors, on the other hand, were as
non-creative with their language as we've come to expect,
although not quite to the point of "Do you think they
know any other words?" from several years ago..We played that
team at their place this year.
M-->
*--I did hear a "Gosh dang it!" on the Calvin sideline.
That was as close as they got to anything unprintable.
11 November 02025: An Interesting
Convergence
File this under "Good Ideas That Don't Go Far Enough"*: Steve
from Allen Park, MI alerted me to this little nugget on the
Facebook
This is a nice tie-in of holly biting to the commemoration of 50
years since the loss of the
Edmund Fitzgerald that's swept
the news this past week or so. While I appreciate the
sentiment, 10 November is still too early for ACATT.
Nonetheless, well-played, Hugh (even if you're fictional).
M-->
*--The related file, "Good Ideas That Went Too
Far", is way much full.
5 November 02025: Regular Programming Resumes
Okay, I'm back. Just in time, too, as
SiriusXM launched its too-early lineup of Christmas music channels
yesterday. (Tip o' the visor to Steve from Allen Park for
notifying me.)
There was a long-running issue over here at the headquarters of
The Markives that centered
around a new server and configuring things so the world, instead
of just the campus, had access to things. (Trust me, this
matters on a much wider scale than this little enterprise.)
In the interim, I was posting very occasionally at
Blogspot, which may or
may not wind up mirroring this site, and whose content will
probably migrate over here before the end of 02025.
M-->
20 January 02025: Lost In Time
I hate to see a really good trivia question rendered obsolete by
the passage of time.
The first time I remember this happening was in 01980, when the
question "Who was the only filly to win the Kentucky Derby?"
(Regret) had to be retired when Genuine Risk won the Run for the
Roses.
Winning Colors came along a few years later and further diminished
the value of this line of questioning.
We lost another one today, when "Who was the only US President to
serve two nonconsecutive terms?" was superseded by events.
You know the ones.
I'm still clinging to "Which is the only current NFL city that has
neither appeared in nor hosted the Super Bowl?", though. I
don't think that one is at risk of disappearing any time soon.
(Fun fact: The answers to both this question and the one that
expired today are the same.)
M-->
19 January 02025: Deathwatch Revisited
Bob Uecker 9, David Lynch 12.
Fair enough, but...Lynch (who never appeared on the show) got a
memorial title card on Saturday Night Live on the 18th/19th,
whereas Uecker--who actually hosted the show--did not.
It seems like SNL is going out of their way to paper over
the Dick Ebersole/Jean Doumanian years. That has some
implications for the big 50th anniversary celebration looming in our
near future.
M-->
11 January 02025 : It's A Beautiful Day...For A Celebrity
Deathwatch Update
Catching up on some late December news, we have: Jimmy Carter
22, Linda Lavin 1.
I don't think that this quite puts Lavin into the "I'm Also Dead!"
club, since she and President Carter weren't exactly on comparable
levels of fame, but I kind of think her passing would've gotten more
attention if it hadn't occurred when it did.
Timing matters, in death as well as in life.
M-->
Previous
editions of The Markives:
Click the
photo to return to the Bollman family main page.
The opinions expressed in this page/section
are strictly those of the page's author. The contents
of this page have not been reviewed or approved by
Albion College.