March Madness 2

So Easter weekend came and went. I managed to not go into the lab for a second straight weekend which is pretty good I think. If things go well this week, I might make it three in a row this coming weekend. All in all things have been pretty low key except for the NCAA tournament now being in full swing. I completed my bracket based on the number of graduate students a given school has. A quick recap, my picks focused around the ratio of graduate student to undergraduates with lower ratios winning out over higher ratios but schools without any graduate students never winning. Given that criteria, I managed to predict at a rate of 72% correct for the first round and also pick more than 50% (4/7) of the underdog victories. Unfortunately the second round has been less kind. Of my remaining 23 teams following the first round...only 7 have survived into the sweet 16 which comes out to a prediction rate of only 43%. Additionally, only 2 of my final 4 teams still remain, Washington State and Michigan State (which have ratios of 0.21 and 0.23 respectively). While I haven't looked at the actual vegas odds for such a final match-up...after doing some quick mental math I would estimate it at approximately 376,592:1 odds that those two teams will form the match-up for the championship game.

In other news, I finally bought a suit for Em's wedding. Really a pretty painless experience, walked in and in just a mere 45 minutes I was out of there with the suit being tailored as I write this. There is a real utility to having men's clothing be based on measurements and for certain styles to always be there. A large selection quickly becomes mangeable when one can quickly eliminate large swaths of items for one of a variety of reasons. I ended up with a fairly classic three-button chalk stripe gray suit with subtle peak lapels and a single vent. The pants were pleated but they are fairly small so i can deal with it. I think it should look nice...assuming the tailor does his job. In other news, there might be a trip to bangkok in my future. In planning this trip to China over the summer, Elsa found some pretty stellar deals on hotels and flights through some chinese travel agency which was really good because things were getting expensive pretty quickly. In addition to running things to beijing (one of our primary travel goals)...they also run trips to thailand which is really cool as well. Since we don't need visas to go there it really isn't any more work to head on over and explore a bit. I think Elsa is probably pretty excited to be going someplace where I don't have a major axe to grind with the government. Of course, I don't know much about Thai politics so there is still time for that to happen. : ) Anyways, more on all that later...Patrick OUT!!!