DID YOU KNOW? In a family with six members, there is a greater than 50% chance that at least two of those members have a birthday within one week of each other. (info courtesy Wikipedia and thekeri).

Wow! Thanks for the great response on the last entry, all you guys. I actually didn't figure it out myself and I was going to sit down and crank it out by hand when I started getting responses, but you all went above and beyond the call of duty with your alternate methods and python scripts and whatnot. And to Prashant and Shishir... of course, the question I meant to ask was "what is the probability that at least two bloggers have a birthday on the same day," because that's the only one that I know how to solve off the top of my head, but I suppose a more interesting question would be "what is the probability that at least two bloggers have a birthday on the same day, but no three bloggers have a birthday on the same day." Because Laura and I wouldn't be quite as cool if say, Melis, Mitra, and Anthony all had the same birthday. The margin of this blog is too narrow to contain the solution to that one, I think.

Anyway, today was pretty cool and low-stress. At my UROP, we're waiting for a part to come, so I spent the better part of the day vacuuming sand out of our reactor and tidying up in general. So, I took a couple-hour lunch break to come home, go running, take a shower, sear a pork chop, roast some zucchini

AAAAGGHGGH!!!!

Sorry, I didn't expect there to be a cat on my windowsill when I looked over.

and have a proper meal before heading back to work. Anyway, on my way back to work I parked my bike under the Green Building for fear of impending rain and walked back over to my UROP. On the way, I'm pretty sure I saw Professor Lodish outside smoking a cigarette. And this just struck me as really weird because

a) the Green Building is for Earth and Planetary Sciences research, and Professor Lodish teaches 7.06: Cell Biology
b) Professor Lodish teaches 7.06: Cell Biology... shouldn't he know better than to be smoking?

I remember in 7.06 during the unit on cancer, Professor Lodish even made sure to ask if any of us smoked and to say that it was really bad and then described in detail why. So this is, I don't know, just like a total loss of childhood innocence for me... like when you go to see a mall santa and it's a girl and she feeds you that story about there being all of Santa's little helpers around the world or when you're at a theme park and see Mickey Mouse with his head half-off.

I still believe in Tim the Beaver, though.

So, yeah, other than taking swing dancing lessons at the MIT Lindy Hop Society with the divine Moria '06, this was really the most interesting thing that happened to me today.

I think it's like seeing a labor economics professor shopping at Wal-Mart, or a thermodynamics professor decreasing entropy.

Note: Just so this isn't taken as libel, I just want to make it clear that I'm pretty sure it looked like Professor Lodish, but not one hundred percent sure--I haven't seen him for over a semester, and I didn't want to stop and stare or anything. Although, as Mollie noted, given his colorful description of the STAT homodimer in the JAK-STAT signaling pathway, this blog entry is probably not the most incriminating thing ever written about him.

Yes, I had to look that one up. Luckily, I put a star by it in my notes.