As has been widely advertised, the jackpot for tonight's Powerball drawing is $250 million. Later today, I'll head out to a store in my Chicago neighborhood to buy a $2 ticket, then spend the rest of the day as I always do before a drawing, daydreaming about what I would do with all that money: A house across the street from Lambeau Field (perhaps attainable without winning the lottery), villas on the beach, bottles of Pappy van Winkle 23-year. The works. Top shelf everything. Living easy.

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"It’s a mirror universe where everything is pliant and groovy, and in that universe there’s someone that stands out, and it’s the boring-looking trenne with its sharp edges.” READ MORE

"If an average-sized human body were rolled into a sphere, how big would that sphere be?"

Big night out last week for Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan! READ MORE

Not just two white men are without jobs, though they're the nice anecdotal evidence for the cover of Newsweek, which announced "The Beached White Male." Oh, you do not say: "Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed." Oh but wait, do not make fun: "It might be tempting to snark at these former fat cats suffering lean times. But when Beached White Males suffer, so do their wives and children." (There are about 52 million married white men in the U.S., by the way.) But it's still safe to say this thesis doesn't have anything to do with numbers in the real world. READ MORE

Goldman Sachs released a report today Wednesday for its clients about unemployment, and finds that extension of unemployment benefits in a recession does not actually make workers lazy and unwilling to work. READ MORE

Do you know why investment banks and hedge funds and insurance companies actually work? If you just said "LAWYERS" or "THE FED WINDOW," you are technically correct. But on a more fundamental level, it's because there are thousands of Ivy League children assiduously doing math all day. These firms are the nation's number one consumer of nerds, and that is why, in the end, great amounts of money are made. (Though it's never the nerds that get the big bonuses, which is a shame.) So when businesses try to rip off a model—for instance, the fine people who mixed viatical settlements with derivative instruments, that is to say, who buy life insurance policies and spread them among investors, hedging against death—they often fail because they don't have enough kids doing math. This is what happened to "Life Partners Holdings Inc., which, by the way, really gay name much? But yeah, they got hosed on the math because their "life partners" (LOL!) just keep not dying: "In policies old enough to provide a measure, the insured people usually haven't died within the life expectancy Life Partners gave its clients, and often were still living beyond double or triple their projected span." Bam! Math does it again.

With today's forthcoming signature by the President, the nation enters a frenzy of wealth transfer over both the next few weeks and the next two years. What does the tax bill do? Here is a fairly simple breakdown. READ MORE