Steven Engelhardt

I spent many weeks of my childhood, along with a substantial portion of last weekend, playing Might and Magic 2, which I purchased in a bundle from GOG.com.

Fond memories.

Stare at the red dot at the center of this image for a minute or two:

Current Cubs team OBP: 0.328
Current Cubs team ERA: 3.79
This year’s prediction: 87-75 (Methodology)
Previous predictions: 82-80 (7/5), 82-80 (6/5), 78-84 (5/12)

Current Cubs team OBP: 0.322
Current Cubs team ERA: 3.90
This year’s prediction: 82-80 (Methodology)
Previous prediction(s): 82-80 (6/5), 78-84 (5/12)

Current Cubs team OBP: 0.329
Current Cubs team ERA: 4.17
This year’s prediction: 82-80 (Methodology)
Previous prediction(s): 78-84 (5/12)

Using Hugin (based on a recommendation from Keith) and some pictures I took last summer, I have created a few stitched panoramic pictures from last year’s Wisconsin vacation:

Now that I have completed my degree in Computational Finance from DePaul University, I have far more time for leisurely activities such as reading books. Here’s what I’ve been reading recently:

	How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff and Irving Geis.
	When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein.
	The Underpants by Steve Martin.
	The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing (Revised Edition) by Benjamin Graham.

Well, the original source of the error was somebody the WSJ quoted, but they took it the next step without correction:

Until recently, for instance, the Lincoln Navigator offered 128 options on its console alone.

“You know what 128-factorial is—it’s a lot of combinations,” Mr. Mulally joked at a conference recently, mocking the number of designs theoretically resulting from mixing-and-matching the options. (Answer: 3.85620482 x 10 to the 215th power.)

Spector, Mike. “Ford Eyes More Cuts as Recovery Advances; Earnings Improve”. The Wall Street Journal 23 April 2008: A1, A14.

128-factorial is the correct number of combinations of options only if the order in which you pick the options is important. It almost certainly is not. Instead, assuming each option is independent and can be either on or off, the correct number of combinations is 2^128—3.4 x 10^38. Mr. Mulally was off by a factor of 177.

Guess who People magazine voted the Sexiest Man Alive in 1992?

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