March 21, 2016 at 04:14AM

Today I Learned: 1) When it comes to binomial distributions with very large N, mean behavior is pretty much the entire spread of behavior. 2) ...March madness is ridiculously fast. Less than a week ago, I made my first bracket. Now it's more or less done and graphs of statistics are going up on the internet. Fun facts -- the best human bracket made it 25 rounds before it guessed wrong. The worst bracket made it 21 rounds before it guessed right. Ancillary fact -- the best way to get information on the numbers of perfect brackets is apparently to trawl the twitter feeds. This is ridiculous. I expected better from sports. 3) EPS (a file format that I think is a precursor to PDF? It's often produced by systems like LaTeX, and is usually immediately converted to PDF) has no native support for transparency (alpha). If you want to use semi-transparent figures in EPS format, you're going to have to rasterize them first.