LottoMax has like $100,000,000 to give away tomorrow… but who cares! There’s far more excitement right here, trying to guess the weekend numbers!!

So… shout-outs to:

The pessimist award goes to Patti Tubbs with her guess of 766

The optimist award goes to Shalom Feigelstock with his guess of 317

The close-but-not-close-enough awards go to Asia Green (479) who missed it by 3 one way, and Elaan Bauder Gudlaugson (485) who missed it by 3 the other way…

And the winner is…

Well, to back up a moment… I never really clarified what I’d do in case of a tie… and especially in the case of a 3-way tie.

For today, there is indeed a 3-way tie. Three people guessed 480, and all three are 2 away from the correct answer of 482.

So… congratulations Sherry Keane! She was the first to guess 480, so she gets first prize! And I will award a second prize, to be split equally, between Melanie Segal and Andrew Brownsword – who also guessed 480… but after Sherry.

And if there’s a next time (yeah, there will be a next time) – the only person who’ll win is the person who guessed the answer first. I guess there can be ties if the answer is 100, and one person guessed 99 and the other 101… that’ll count as two wins. But duplicate guesses won’t count. In the future, only the first one gets it.

But today – all three of you, please send me your charities of choice!

Also interesting – but not surprising – I’ve attached a histogram of all the guesses. It’s not surprising to see a pretty even distribution… there’s definitely a bell-curve of sorts there. And it’s not surprising to see… the tallest column, the range of (475 – 525) – the one with the most guesses — that’s where the answer was.

There are two things I remember from stats class… one was the time a fly landed on the overheard projector – you know, the old-school ones where the transparency is on roll… and after you fill up the page with scribbles, you scroll it a bit… anyway, this fly had been bugging the prof for a while… and at one point it landed right in the middle of the transparency. He slammed his hand down on it, and the entire lecture hall was treated to the sight of a 5-foot fly’s guts oozing onto the screen. Lots of groans, and maybe a shriek or two. He just looked at it… and said, “huh”… and scrolled it, and kept going. Huh indeed.

The other thing I remember is that averages typically are pretty useful. Lots of numbers on their own not so much, but there’s something to be learned from sample averages, and averages of sample averages.

Anyway, all of you collectively… got it! Nicely done.

OK, Lotto Max time…