the groundhog day project

So, my point was supposed to be about Punxsutawneyans' treatment of their homeless population, and I will get to that. But, first, how to narrow down 440.83 supposedly "eligible" women to Phil's 63? As I said at the end of yesterday's entry, Phil likes brunettes (Rita), redheads (Nancy), and blondes (Laraine). And, I've already narrowed down his interest range by age, based on those three: 30 to 34. In trying to narrow down the options a little more, I was reminded of an episode of This American Life --Episode 486: Valentine's Day . The opener for the show involves David Kestenbaum, a physicist attempting "to employ the power of mathematics to estimate the likelihood of finding a girlfriend." Permit an extended excerpt: David Kestenbaum So we started to do the calculation on the board and-- can you look up what the population of Boston is? Ira Glass Now David is asking me to look this up because at this point in our interview I actually made...

I was going to open with the following: The people of Punxsutawney, PA are assholes. And, this is why. They've got one homeless guy in the entire town, and they can afford to have a whole lot of groundhog banners and groundhog trashcans, not to mention that stage on Gobbler's Knob and all those Inner Circle guys' fancy suits, but they can't help out one nice old guy with a meal and a warm place to be? Then, I got sidetracked by math. To demonstrate that Punxsutawney was small enough that we can assume only the one homeless guy exists, I wanted to figure out just how populated Punxsutawney is. Mind you, I don't mean the real-world Punxsutawney but the film version. The film version of Punxsutawney is significantly smaller (in population) than the real one. I started by thinking the movie didn't tell us the population (a mistake I realized pretty quickly). So I looked up Punxsutawney's population, 5,962 as of 2010, closer to 7,000 in 1990 (the film presumab...