Posts tagged with “nerd”

If you’re in Boston, making video games, and/or are even remotely interested in the business side of game dev I’d definitely recommend checking out the MIT BiG conference happening this coming Friday at the Microsoft NERD center next to MIT. It’s going to be a day long deal with all sorts of interesting panels on non-traditional marketing strategies, the changing face of social games, and “the next big thing”. Of course, the panel I’m most interested in is how to build and launch a gaming start up, mostly because I’m on it. It should be a lot of fun, I know that some of the guys here in the office are already starting a pool on what kind of stupid stuff I’m going to say.

Oh, and did I mention that we’ll be showing off Slam Bolt Scrappers at the conference? It’s true! We’ll have an awesome 4 player build for people to play, so if you didn’t get a chance to try the game out at PAX East be sure to swing by the conference and give our game a shot! Priority will be given to cosplaying conference goers, especially ones dressed up as Ghostbusters or giant chickens.

MIT had it’s grad gala on Saturday night this past weekend, and a lot of people went! 710, to be exact. Afterwards everyone hit the dance floor, and I got to thinking. Could it be that the dance floor was in fact the nerdiest dance floor ever? Possibly! A room full of MIT PhD students is quite the geek-out, and would certainly put us up there in the running. Perhaps the Nobel Prizes has some sort of break dancing event after the award ceremony? That could one up this, I suppose. Top 10 for sure though!

BONUS MATH SECTION: While we were sitting and eating dinner we heard two groups of people singing happy birthday to someone at their table. We started wondering – given that there were so many people in the room, how many tables would sing happy birthday? For simplification’s sake we decided to pretend that people would only sing happy birthday if it was someone’s birthday that day (and not just “close by”). Well, as you might guess 710/365 is about 2, so you would expect that 2 tables would sing. But that’s not good enough! What about the standard deviation – how many people could have birthdays within the realm of reason? A quick backhand calculation of standard deviation ( which is: square root([E[X^2]] – [E[X]]^2) ) yielded (sqrt(E[~50,000] – 2^2), which is about sqrt(135), which is about 11.5. So if my math isn’t wrong (and it might be), up to 13 people could have birthdays and it wouldn’t be weird.

Update: I’m an idiot, the standard dev is much lower at around 1.3 or so. In that case it’s extremely unlikely (read: around 1 in a hundred chance) that you would even have 6 or more people having a birthday today. That’s not particularly intersting, so can anyone do a better job of this? I’d love to take into account other factors, like when babies are born, likelihood of twins, and to get rid of the assumption that people only celebrated their birthday on that day.