THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

Yeah another one. If you didn’t see the one I posted an hour or so ago, scroll down. I seem to get blogging ideas in spurts. This one is about our school levy. As you may or may not be aware, the school levy in Madeira failed by 15 votes. (1680-1665 for those of you keeping score at home)

So Carolyn is on the Madeira email list and today she got an email from the Superintendent, mentioning that there were 97 ballots that were not counted (due to problems at the polling places) and 38 provisional ballots (usually people that have recently moved to the district and whose voter records are not updated yet).

The superintendent’s letter said (among other things) that since the final result of the levy was not known, that he is going to hold off on making the $1 million in cuts that they’d have to make if the levy failed, since the outcome is not yet decided.

So, the math/stats geek in me was wondering what the odds were that these 135 ballots would be enough to make up the 15 vote difference. One problem is that there is exactly 1 thing that I remember about my Probability and Statistics classes from college. And that is that when Jay heard that my teacher was “M. Levine”, he unleashed the witty quote (commenting on her age) “She’s 100 if she’s a day”, a quote which has incorporated its way into the Miller family lexicon

Unfortunately, that didn’t help me much in trying to figure out the odds. I thought that it seemed like a binomial distribution. Pascal’s Triangle figured to be heavily involved. My assumption was that there was a 50/50 shot that each vote would be pro or against, and 76 yes votes needed to pass the levy (75 yes would be 60 no and therefore a tie). Essentially it is the same question as if you flip a coin 135 times, what are the odds that 76 or more will be heads?

I used the Excel formula

=BINOMDIST(59,135,0.5,TRUE) (with 59 being 135-76), which comes out to 8.143%

That seemed really low, but upon further review, I believe that to be correct. There was one guy here that I asked that was adamant that the odds were 59/135. I was pretty sure that he was wrong, but he was so adamant that I gave it a second chance, but I am now 99% convinced that he was wrong, and the analysis above is correct.

I emailed a copy of this to the Superintendent too, because I thought he might be interested.

So…. I’ve been having a….problem lately…. with my pants….

And that is, my pants are too big!

As I have posted previously, I have recently been embarking on a bit of a health kick. I still am doing that, at least sort of. As you may or may not be aware, my “revolutionary” diet plan is called “eat less, exercise more”. I haven’t really been exercising more. I do exercise some, but that is mostly just incidental stuff – play basketball occasionally, mowing the lawn, walking around the block, working in the yard, etc.

But I have definitely been eating less. For awhile, I was tracking my caloric intake daily on a website. I haven’t been doing that lately, but I still have been trying to limit myself to approximately 2000 calories a day. Mostly what this entails is not snacking in the middle of the day, and especially at night.

I’ve also been trying to not eat late. I have always heard that not eating right before you go to bed can help weight loss. Though this seems to indicate that that is a myth (Myth #10). So I’m not sure about that. It seems to make sense to me, along with its corollary that eating right after you exercise is good since your metabolism is good. Though I suppose if you think about it, if you didn’t eat right after you exercise, then your high metabolism would be put to work burning off fat stores. So I’m not sure about the timing.

In any case, I feel good about my 2000 calorie diet. The results have been good so far too. As I posted back in March, I was at 210 lbs. We later got a new digital scale, which seemed to indicate that the other scale was off by 4 lbs, so I think my start weight was 214 lbs back on 3/22. I currently tip the scales at 194.4, as measured this morning. 20 lbs in a little more than a month and a half is a pace I don’t expect to continue. Part of that I think is due to the fact that I started (at 214) at the high side of general weight fluctuation.

Goal remains 170 lbs by next March. Phases 2 and 3 involve exercising more as well as eating better. Right now I am just concentrating on eating less. I do believe that exercising more and eating better are both important but I am not currently focusing on that.

I don’t really feel like I’ve lost that much weight, besides my pants problem. Though Carolyn says that she thinks I look skinnier, and I guess she looks at me more…