J. Michael Andresen

Yesterday I was bored for a bit at work and decided to update the "expectation" fields of the prognostication quiz from the method I used before (where the entrants in the quiz predicted which answers were more likely to win) to the real world's predictions of events. I found betting odds for the three remaining major league sporting questions, as well as prediction markets for the presidential election. I left the previous system in place for the remaining questions. In the old system of predicting, I led the pack at the start of the contest (along with Laura). In the new system and three questions in, I am second from dead last! My predicted final score is 1.58. Only my darling wife is worse off than I am at this point, with a predicted final score of 1.13. At the top of the pack right now is Sandy, with a predicted score of 3.92. That's a fun fact because it's her birthday today. I'm sure that nothing she might receive for her birthday is more exciting or...

When I was doing my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, I had a group of close friends who were all expatriates from Epsilon Theta Fraternity at MIT. I had the opportunity to spend a weekend at the beginning of March with six of them, all married couples: Ekrem & Leanne, Greg & Kim, and Ken & Jen. (Epsilon Theta is co-educational and felicitously facilitated such nuptials!) All were invited to my wedding last June, but only Ekrem could attend due to the tribulations of parenthood (each couple has two young children). Ekrem and Leanne now live in Boston, where I get to see them on a regular basis because I travel there often for work. I have not been back to Berkeley since I left seven years ago, though. The six expatriates coordinated a joint vacation to Fort Myers, Florida this past March. Catching wind of the plan, I (somewhat brazenly, perhaps, for someone without the requisite two children) asked if Katie and I might join them for the weekend. We did just tha...