I was thinking about whether and what to write in this post, and the answer to both was inspired by the latest comment on my blog (Alice’s). Yes, even the great Shanghai Kid is a whore for comments, and would probably discontinue blogging if enough posts went by without a comment. By the way, yes I am right wing, at least on most issues – the online Political Compass test tells me I’m a moderate libertarian.

Before I get to the subject of this post, I wanna share what I found on the WSJ website today:

That’s right, the WSJ, David Letterman and SNSD in the same article. Times have changed, huh? Ever since wasting hours watching the Letterman show on Youtube during the last SWOTVAC, I’ve taken a liking to the show. And now SNSD have appeared as guests on the same show that has hosted leaders like Bill Clinton and first-class idiots like Paris Hilton. That increases my respect (or pervertedness) for SNSD many times over.

Eye candy for my blog, sourced from the WSJ.

However, I’m a bit worried about the presence of SNSD on the number one reading material for bankers worldwide. It gets the group the attention of dirty old men (40-year-old unmarried banking VPs and MDs), psychopaths (Patrick Bateman) and 80-hour-week Excel monkeys with a habit of ‘releasing stress’ in the office (Rolfe and Troob 2001).

Anyway, that’s all about SNSD’s latest accomplishments. The rest of this post is about maths.

1. How many books will you read for fun in your life?

Suppose you read 5-10 books for fun per year (novels, biographies, etc.) – that’s about how it is for me. Suppose you’re 20 years old and you’ll live to 90. Then you’ve got 350-700 books to read. Since work and family commitments will eat up most of your time from the end of uni to the start of retirement, I’ll take a lower estimate of 500. Assuming that about half of those books are novels, then you’ve got a quota of only 250 novels to read in your life. Which ones will it be? Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are pretty thick books, so if we count each as 1.5 books, then together they make up 15/250 = 6% of your lifetime quota. Only 94% left.

2. What are your chances of getting an IB job straight out of undergrad in Australia?

I don’t know what the annual grad intake is, but let’s say it’s about 50 people – that seems about right since the Eurozone problems, anyway. Melbourne’s BCom intake per year is at about 800. Obviously, not all BCom students want IB jobs, but there are also applicants from other degrees, e.g. the old BCom/LLB, BCom/BA and BCom/BSc. All in all, I think 400 is a reasonable estimate of how many undergrad applicants there are each year from Melbourne Uni. If there’s the same number from each Group of 8 uni, that’s 3200 in total. Considering there also postgrad applicants from MFin, MCom and so on, let’s take that figure up to 4000. 50/4000 = 1.25%, so you need to be in the top 1.25% of applicants in terms of grades, work experience, interviewing skills and luck to make it in. Good luck.

3. What are your chances of finding your ideal partner?

By that, I mean a partner who pretty much suits your preferences perfectly. From a male perspective:

There are 4 million people in Melbourne, of which 2 million are females. Assuming about 10% of these females are of a suitable age, that’s 200 000 people. If 1 in 10 are really good looking, and a further 1 in 10 have a suitable personality and outlook, that brings the pool down to 2000. Considering level of education and income, maybe 1 in 5 pass, so now we’re at 400. Then, in terms of family background and culture, again I’ll assume that 1 in 5 pass, making it 80. Of course, the girl’s preferences matter too, and we’ll assume that 1 in 10 are actually interested in the guy as well. So all in all, there are about 8 girls in Melbourne that would suit the ideal of a (very picky) guy. Chances are, he’ll never happen to meet those 8 girls.