Entry 60: Does Obama Read My Blog?

[Reader of this blog?]

I know, it seems unlikely that President Obama is among the four people (myself included) who read this blog, but in my last entry I wrote the following, concerning the “serious” and “courageous” Republican plan (spearheaded by that Ryan guy) to balance the federal budget.

If I were a Democratic politician I would repeat the following again and again and again, “They don’t really want to balance the budget, they just want to finance tax cuts for the super rich.”

This week Obama offered a plan of his own. He also gave a well-deserved verbal smackdown of the Ryan Plan. Here’s a quote.

There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.

It appears as if Obama is taking my advice. What other explanation is there than that he reads this blog?

The Dems have a pair of aces in that Reps want to extend tax cuts for the super rich, and they want to potentially devalue Medicare by turning it into a voucher system. I don’t think either of these is popular with the voting public. Obama needs to keep playing this hand.

In other news, I mentioned a job prospect a few entries ago, and I interviewed with a second person about it a few days ago. The interview went OK, I wouldn’t say great. At the end of it, he asked me to do some math problems. I couldn’t do the first one, because it was dealing with some things that I haven’t looked at in a very long time. They aren’t deep concepts, but in order to solve problems on them, I’d need at least a few minutes to go through and review definitions and that type of thing. He seemed to be OK with this – it’s perfectly reasonable to me to not have something fresh in your mind – but who knows? Maybe in his head it was a strike against me.

The second problem he asked me was this. You have a coin, and you have three directions you can go, left, right, and straight. You must use the coin to determine which direction to take. The underlying assumption here is that you want a process that returns all the directions with equal probability.

Now, I should say, that I am not very good at solving things like this on the spot. It’s not how I work. I like go to slowly, I like to belabor the obvious if need be, I like to reconsider everything I do, even easy things. Thinking analytically on my feet is extremely difficult for me. To make matters worse, I’m self-conscious about it. I’ve always felt like I’m an inefficient thinker, and so when people want to know my thought process, and when pressure is on me to produce instantly, sometimes I get up in my head, and don't do as well as I could.

For the first few moments after he posed the question, I wasn’t even thinking about it. All I was thinking about was how I wasn’t thinking about it. It’s akin to that feeling when you can’t sleep, so you start obsessing about how you can’t sleep, which of course only makes it worse.

Anyway, I sat there for what seemed like a very long time (I’m not sure how long it was in actuality), and had quite a few “OK, here’s… no, wait… that won’t work” moments, before I came up with a solution that works and that he seemed to be happy with.

(Spoiler alert: I'm going to reveal the answer now.)

Flip the coin twice. This gives you four possible outcomes (HH, HT, TH, TT). Before you flip, assign the three directions to the first three outcomes. If any of these come up then that's the direction you go. If you get the last outcome, then you just do the entire thing again. It’s mathematically impossible for the last outcome to happen every time, so eventually this process will give you a direction to go.

It seems pretty simple in retrospect. I would have liked to come up with this immediately, and I would have liked to have answered the interviewer’s first question, but what can you do? I didn’t knock it out of the park, but I didn’t completely whiff either. We shall see…

Speaking of baseball, it’s the baseball season. (S-weet!) I’ve been trying a new thing, betting on baseball. Sports betting (really gambling of any sort) is legal and prevalent Down Under. I tried betting on football last fall, but I lost more than I won. I started with $100 and probably lost $40 total on football. The NFL is just too unpredictable. But with baseball, I’m up about $45. Being that I only had about $60 to start with, that’s a pretty good return so far. However, it’s not clear to me whether this is something that’s sustainable or if I’ve just been getting lucky. Either way, I keep the stakes low, and if I lose my initial $100 I’m out, so it’s not like I’ll be pawning my wedding ring for funds, or getting my legs busted by Paulie Walnuts or anything like that.

[I took Brett Cecil to beat the Red Sox today at 1:1.5 odds. He did.]

[Gratuitous picture of Brett Cecil's fiancee.]

The thing is, it wouldn’t be completely out of the question if I could keep winning. Since I was a second grader, I’ve been a baseball stat-nut. I used to play out full leagues on Nintendo and meticulously keep stats on every game that I played. I used to collect baseball cards and spend more time reading the backs than looking at the pictures. More recently, I’ve gotten into “advanced stats” and, for the most part, I keep up with the game. I know what I’m doing. But do I know what I’m doing enough to beat those shifty odds-makers? I’m not convinced yet.

Anyway, I’m going to end this post now. It’s been pouring rain here all damn day, but it looks like it might have let up a bit. Maybe I can sneak in a trip to the gym without getting drenched.

Nope, it started pouring again as I punched that last period. Boo.