Birthday Blog

Okay, let's just get it over with. It's my birthday. Yay. I guess I couldn't really call it a coincidence, but today is merely the time when the Earth happens to be in the exact same location in its journey around the sun as it was on the day I was born. Otherwise it's just an ordinary day. Don't take that to mean that I don't appreciate all the birthday wishes I've received. Keep them coming! Just to let you know how much I appreciate them and I guess to let some of you inside my head, I want to share a very personal story:

In 11th grade, Ramaz took all of us on "Junior Retreat," a weekend getaway, which was designed to strengthen the bonds of our friendship before we began to seek our own fortunes out in the real world. They had a ropes course, various sporting events, and a beautiful Shabbat planned. I remember an awesome game of tackle football that we played in the snow. I remember my friend breaking his knee on a tackle and then intercepting the very next pass and returning it for a touchdown. There were some great times.
After Shabbos, some students prepared a slide-show, which had pictures of us from school. You know, there were pictures of us talking, and hanging out, maybe doing funny things, etc. And as we were all watching the show, we would applaud for the people in each picture to varying degrees. Out of the 100 or so pictures, there might have been one or two of me, and to my chagrin, I received very little applause. Now don't get me wrong, I have great friends from high school, and we're all still close, but I was really sad that I hadn't had enough of an effect on the rest of my class throughout the years to garner more than a few claps.
After the event, before we went to bed, I laid out on the grass outside of our bunk. It was cold and beautiful outside; the sky was cloudless and I could see a million stars. And on that night I cried. I wept uncontrollably for what seemed like forever. I cried to G-d, and I cried to my mother, and I'm crying now just remembering it. Here I am, sitting at my desk, and I'm crying. For every birthday wish I received last night and so far today, I shed a tear to erase the ones from that moment on that empty field. I know that no matter what I might have felt on that cold December night, I have friends today who care about me. So again, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for your wishes.

Just as an aside, no fewer than three people told me this weekend that they missed me over Shabbos. They said it felt strange when they looked over to my seat in synagogue and didn't see me there. That meant a lot to me too. Look how far I've come.

Okay, so you ever hear that math problem that asks how many people you need in a room to have a reasonable chance of two of them having the same birthday? Well, most people seem shocked that the answer is only 23. In case anyone is interested, here's how it's done:

First, understand that the easiest way to determine the probability of two people having the same birthday in a room of N people, is to figure out the probability of everyone having a different birthday and then subtracting that probability from 100%, okay? It should make sense that there are two options: a) everyone has a different birthday, or b) some people have the same birthday. The probability of one plus the probability of the other equals 100%. Great.

The probability of the only two people in the room having different birthdays is (1-(1/365)). Very high. The probability of all three people in the room having the different birthdays is (1-(1/365)) x (1-(2/365)). You might see a pattern developing. The general formula for the probability of all N people in the room having a different birthday (assuming there are fewer than 365 people in the room) is: 365! / ((365^N)(365-N))!

The exclamation point is the symbol for the "factorial" function, which means you multiply the number by each integer below it until you get to one (ex: 5! = 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120)

Great, so the probability of any of N people in a room having the SAME birthday comes out to 1 - (365! / ((365^N)(365-N))!). Now all you have to do is plug in your number for N, the amount of people in the room. For N = 23, the probability is about 50.7%. Just for argument's sake, if you have 100 people in a room, the probability that two people have the same birthday is around 99.99996%.

Excellent! Now, in case you were curious, if you wanted to figure out the probability of someone having the same birthday as you, that's a different problem. That's the same thing as asking what's the probability of two people having a specific birthday, whereas the previous problem doesn't care about which date the people share. The formula for the probability of someone in a room of N people having the same birthday as you is: 1 - ((365-1)/365)^N. In order for there to be a greater than 50% chance of someone having the same birthday as you, there needs to be 253 other people in the room.

Okay, that's the end of today's math lesson (thanks to wikipedia for all the info).

I went on facebook last night to check out the myriad wall posts I received, and I noticed that on the top of the page it has a little birthday box. It says something like "Happy Birthday, Noah! From all of us on The Facebook Team, have a great day!" You know what? That's really nice. It's unnecessary and quite meaningless, but still.

Since I absolutely could not fall asleep last night, I found myself watching last year's World Series of Poker on ESPN2 at about 1:30 am. At that hour you see the most random commercials. One of them was for a TimeLife series of CDs called "I Can Only Imagine." It's a collection of 22 Christian faith songs. The first thing I thought was that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen (one of the songs was actually called "Kel Shakkai," except with the real words, without the "K" and "dd" instead of "kk"), except then I realized that I basically listen to the exact same kind of music only in Hebrew. I can only imagine what people think of my taste in music.

I went to KJ for Seudah Shlishit, and they had a presentation of several Ramaz students who had gone to York, Pennsylvania for a few days to volunteer for a project called Habitat for Humanity, in which they helped other volunteers build houses for people who lost theirs for varying reasons. It was really quite nice. But the part I found noteworthy was that the students had become friends with the local Chabad Rabbi on facebook. It's ridiculous how far facebook has extended its grasp. Facebook is insane as it is right now, but can you imagine what it will be like for those high school students by the time they're our age?

Okay, I'm done. Wait, you know how when you go to a wedding or an engagement party you wish everyone there a Mazal Tov? I don't mean just to the bride and groom, but to everyone you see. What do you do at a birthday party? I think I'm gonna go ahead and wish everyone a Happy Birthday today, and I will continue to do so at other birthday parties. Az Happy Birthday everyone.