Links for 2010-12-31

"No comic filmmaker is more intimately associated with improvisation than Christopher Guest, an alum of The National Lampoon Radio Hour and Saturday Night Live who made his name as a filmmaker co-writing, directing, and co-starring in improvised films riffing loosely on show business and music. In his most beloved films as a director, Guest comes up with a loose framework for a film with collaborator Eugene Levy, then has a cast of skilled, veteran improvisers fill in the blanks with their comical genius. "

"I study math in college and actually did a project on this and there have been numerous studies to predict the best strategies in Monopoly. Because it is all based on random chance, the exact probabilities can be determined by use of a Markov Chain. The "Go to Jail" square acts as a kind of sink, depriving the spaces after it of opportunities to be landed on, where as the "Jail" square acts as a source and allows spaces after it to get landed on more frequently. I have attached an exact probability distribution for your enjoyment. "

#17 on the People Who Mattered in 2010 list: "No one had as much effect on air travel in 2010 as the horrifying Icelandic mountain ogress Grýla, who this spring launched a plume of ash 30,000 feet into the sky from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, shutting down airports across Europe and costing the global economy hundreds of millions of dollars."