[Technical Difficulties]

Sorry for the radio silence.  My Lenovo seems to have short-circuited somehow.  Will eventually sort it out.  Maybe even soon.

In the meantime, have you seen Bridge of Spies, as suggested?  Really good, no?

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Oh!  And if you like a challenge, here’s one:  Facebook told me that five of my friends have birthdays today.  Three of those five are named Josh.  What are the odds?

(Seriously: what are the odds?  Can anybody take a stab at figuring it out?  I guess you’d start here — Josh is only the 437th most popular first name in America — except that Joshua is the 38th, so adding the two together gives you about 560,000 Americans, or 1 in 600 or so.  So the chance of a second of the 5 names being Josh after the first is about 1 in 600 . . . and the chance that a third  would be Josh is 1/600th of that — so 1 in 360,000?  Six or seven times less likely than drawing 4 aces in a game of 5-card stud.  Except that a preponderance of my friends are male, so maybe the odds of my three Joshes today were more like 1 in 200,000.  But still.   Did I calculate this in vaguely the right way?)

Wish me luck in computer hell . . .