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...

And it's The Washington Post by a landslide! They won 6 Pulitzer Prizes for a clear majority. That means that the answer to question #4 in the prognostication quiz is D. We now have a single leader for the first time! Matthew B. now leads the field with 2 points. Only two other people (Jon and Sandy) picked The Washington Post . That makes 11 people tied for second place with 1 point. The remaining fifteen contestants (your correspondent included) have yet to pick something correctly. Next up is the Stanley Cup (question 5). This is one of only five questions in the quiz where each of the six answers was picked at least once. Matthew B. was alone amongst those with points in picking the Anaheim Ducks to go all the way. Sadly, they are losing in the first round of the playoffs (0-2 in the best-of-seven series). So it looks like one (or more) will tie Matthew B. in early June. The most likely outcomes are probably C. Detroit (#1 seed in the West), D. San Jose (#2 seed in the West),...

This year, the Major Leage Baseball season started with a pair of regular season games (not just exhibition games) in Japan. The two teams featured are the Oakland Athletics and my favorite Boston Red Sox. Japan is 14 hours ahead of Minneapolis, so the night games in Tokyo started at 5 a.m. yesterday and today local time. Fanatic that I am for the Red Sox, I set the alarm yesterday for 4:30 so I could get in to work in time to listen to the live feed of the game starting at 5. I was running a bit late, but luckily so were the Sox. I sprinted from my parking place to lab and just got the computer booted in time to connect to the live feed at 5:10 and hear the first pitch of the new season. Yesterday's game was thrilling. I was down in the mouse room for most of it. We fell behind, but tied the game in the ninth inning and then won the game in the tenth. What a great way to start the season! Sadly, this morning's game ended in a loss. I feel partly responsible because I didn'...

Yesterday, on the first full day of spring, we had a big snowstorm. I went for a walk and was inspired to write a haiku. By callow brick walls, snow falls on insouciant trees, as timeless as I. I was struck with the confluence in time of the snow (ancient), the trees (more recent), the buildings (even more recent), and me (most recent of all, but imbued with consciousness that gives me the illusion of being more important than all the rest - which makes me the most callow and perhaps the most insouciant as well).

Before I start, I would like to thank Beth Kelly for giving me her copy of this book. I had seen it on her bookshelf and (recognizing that it was on my list) asked to borrow it. "You can not only borrow it, you can keep it," she said, with what seemed like inexplicable glee. She explained that an ex-boyfriend had given her the book and that she no longer had any use for it. On the Road is an autobiographical book with the names changed, perhaps to protect the innocent. Jack and his "beat generation" friends crisscross the country in the late 1940s, doing a variety of drugs, and stealing gasoline and groceries (and even cars) when they run low on money. They disrespect and mistreat women ranging from Mexican prostitutes to their own mothers and aunts. Why do I care? I did, however, get caught up in Kerouac's desultory idylls describing his drives across the continent. I've driven across the country numerous times, and for me it's always been highly memor...

A friend of Katie's (Sara) is a high school librarian, and runs a wonderful program as part of that. It's a "Breakfast Book Club" where the students meet on a purely voluntary basis to get together once a month to discuss a book. It was covered recently in a local news broadcast . Sara is the one in the clip asking the students if Muhammad Yunus (microcredit pioneer) deserved his Nobel Prize in Economics. I really think it's a great program. Too often I think students slip into viewing school in a negative light because it's mandatory. An engaging but voluntary scholarly activity such as your book club is a wonderful reminder that learning is fun. It empowers students to think, "Hey, I enjoy learning so much that I'm doing it without it being required!" I've fallen prey to that type of thinking in the past, too. When I played football in high school, I hated the gruelling practices. For some reason, though, I always went to the one optional ...