E-Mail Legend

How do I know I am a Campus Legend at Michigan? Because 8 months after I graduate they are still detailing my exploits in the Michigan Daily. Last April I detailed the horrific disaster of group emailing. The post, including what I had emailed is here.

I send out this email as a joke, write the blog post and go on my merry way. Fast forward 8 months. The daily writes a story where they quote (actually misquote) the email I wrote.

It wasn’t, of course, the end. Later on, the 65th response took frustration to a new level.

“I swear that if any one else replies to all I will hunt you down on the umich directory and disable every electronic device that they own.,” it read. “I will convert your keyboard layout to Swahili. / The person who sent out the original e-mail spammed a group that she does not control. SHE CANT TAKE YOU OFF THE MAILING LIST. You have to e-mail the owner to be removed. DON’T EMAIL THE ENTIRE GROUP TO BE REMOVED. Seriously learn some email etiquette.”

That's how I know. 8 months after I graduate The Daily publishes emails I wrote.

The Roomates: Max

Over the course of my four years in college I lived with a total of 20 different people. If I count the people who stayed with us, or the practically live-in girlfriends that number approaches 30. 5 of them were girls, and some of them were quite blogable. Many of them also make up the readership of this blog. Time to burn some bridges. So lets start from the start: Max.

Max was my freshmen year roommate. Meaning that I didn't have any say in the matter of us living together. Max was from Chicago, and if I recall his facebook page said that he was at one time an Ambercrombie model. I later found out that this was completely untrue, but Max probably could have been. I've allured to him before in this blog, most aptly:

My freshmen year roommate would sit on our futon all day every Saturday and browse Facebook. He had one of two standard responses to everyone on Facebook.

1) This chick is hot. I'm going to facebook her.
or 2) He's in that frat? They're so gay.

I found his life to be interesting, but himself to be quite boring. His personality was not one that would fit itself to long conversations of philosophical importance, but rather to lists of the top 10 mammals with the largest dongs.

Within several days of living together, we both realized that we were very different people. He instantly went out and joined a frat. You could have taken one look at him and known that. Which ended up being nice, because while he was busy doing the elephant walk I had the room to myself. This story seems to describe Max perfectly. When he was rushing, his best friend on the hall also rushed. His best friend was pretty cool but after awhile he began to see through all of the pledging bullshit. He would come over and talk to Max about how he would keep doing it so that he could be a brother, but was disillusioned by the process. (He probably said that with 50-300 more of the phrase "Bro get this") Max would agree, and then he would go and tell the brothers that his best friend wasn't 100% into it. He managed to get his best friend kicked out of the pledge class. Classic Max.

We got along fine. Mostly because we quickly realized that we were never going to be friends. Then it just came down to co-existing. Plus, he had a smoking hot GF and they used to bone while they thought I was asleep. But as someone who was obsessed with his own vanity, he found it particularly hard to -how do you say- not be a douche bag.

During the next three years I would sometimes run into him around campus. Usually I would be walking with my friends and he would be going to the gym. We would say hi as we passed. That was about all that needed to be said.

Brian Wins epic game of risk

I play online risk at a site called Conquer Club. They have many different maps than the original board game, and players have 24 hours to take their turn. I usually go on once a day to take my turns.

Back in September I started out in an 8 person game of a map called Europa (shown below).

The game just finished today; 208 days and 128 rounds after it begun. It was a marathon game of attrition.

Sept 14th - Game Begins
Sept 17th - I capture the Hellenics
Oct 4th - I capture the 5 Mediterranean Island bonus
Oct 5th - First player is eliminated
Oct 9th - Second player is eliminated
Nov 3rd - I lose the Hellenics
Nov 12th - I capture the Italic States
Jan 15th - I lose the Mediterranean Island Bonus
March 4th - Third player is eliminated
March 8th - Fourth player is eliminated. This was the same player that had eliminated the third player just 4 days prior.
March 11th - I recapture the Mediterranean Island Bonus
March 16th - I capture Western Europe
March 18th - I capture Benelux. I am now the most powerful player in the game.
March 29th - I capture Central Europe. If the other players have any chance they need to stop me now.
April 1st - 5th player is eliminated. He attempted to to organize a large attack on me. He is justly killed and the bloody head on the fence post shows the two remaining players that they can't mess with me. I am now too strong, any attempts at resistance is futile.
April 9th - Sixth player is eliminated. The last two players were trying to combine forces to take me on. After finishing him off I am barely stronger than the last remaining player
April 10th - VICTORY! I get promoted to Captain.

It was a thrilling game that for months at a time were sheer boredom. But I emerged victorious because of patience, skill and a solid understanding of game theory.

Baseball Betting Analysis

I've decided to use the analysis I conducted on NFL season over/unders and apply it to Baseball.

The first thing that I did was compare the Vegas estimated total wins for the baseball against the possible number of total wins. I added all the teams over/unders and got 2441.5. Which is amazing because the baseball season only consists of 2430 games. That leaves 11.5 wins unaccounted for. The reason that this occurs is that most sports fans like to bet on their team to do well. Because off all this action on the overs, Vegas moves the lines to attract the betting on the other side.

Not only are the over/unders inflated on the aggregate, they are also somewhat normalized. During the 2009 season there were 5 teams that had less than 70 wins, Vegas predicts that no team this year will have below 70 wins. There have been at least 4 teams that go below 70 wins each of the last 5 years. If I could make a prop bet that at least three teams will have less than 70 wins, I would take it.

Here is a chart that compares this years predictions vs. last years results:
For comparison, I took the variance in number of wins between 2010 and 2009. Vegas predictions have a variance of 46.56 while the actual variance last year was 126.40.

I believe most of those 11 phantom wins that Vegas is predicting will affect teams in the bottom half of the league. Fans being hopelessly optimistic will always believe (and bet) that their teams will do better than expected. For football I actually compared the teams to their schedule and used Vegas's own odds to predict how well they would do against other teams. Since I don't have time to compare a 2430 game MLB season, I think I'll just bet the under on each of the bottom 7 teams. I'll throw a little more money on the ones at the very bottom.

Even though I don't know much about baseball I can still confidently predict the results of teams that I cannot name a player on the roster. 6 months from now I'll see how good my predictions were.

Bets:
Pittsburgh Pirates - under 70
Son Diego Padres - under 71
Toronto Blue Jays - under 71
Washington Nationals- under 71
Kansas City Royals - under 71.5
Baltimore Orioles - under 74
Houston Astros - under 74.5