Playing the lottery, at least on a national scale, is often called "a tax on people who are bad at math." The odds of winning the top prize in the Powerball lottery are a constant 1 in 175 million. The number of people who buy lottery tickets does not affect the odds of winning, but it does affect the odds that more than one winner will have to split the jackpot.

That said, there can be benefits from buying a ticket even when you don't win, up to a point. If you buy a raffle ticket that will benefit a charity, you've made a donation. If you get as much pleasure out of hoping to win on your $2 ticket as you would have gotten out of the $2 candy bar you otherwise would have bought, then it's worth the $2. But if you buy more tickets, the net worth goes down as it cuts into the family's grocery budget. And if you will be sorely disappointed when you don't win, the value of the initial pleasure is wiped out.

But what happens when you win the jackpot? Business Insider take a look at the option you have of taking the winnings in a lump sum vs. an annual payout plan. They crunch the numbers as far as taxes and investments go. Taxes are going to take a lot of the money either way, but when the jackpot is $400 million, does that really matter? The real difference is in whether you invest your winnings. A decent investment plan will make a lump sum pay off big over time.

What the article does not cover are real-life headaches for a lottery winner. Here are your estimated payouts, which will vary depending on your state taxes:

You can take the cash up front. This is a $223.6 million check. After paying federal taxes on it, we calculated that you'd have $135.1 million left. Not bad.

You could also take the annuity, which pays $400 million over 30 years with an increasing annuity — $7.1 M the first year, $7.4M the next, increasing up to $22.2M in the 30th year — and pay the top rate every year for the next thirty. That makes the $400 million jackpot worth, assuming the tax rates don't change from here to 2043, $242.9 million after federal taxes.

Now factor in all your relatives, who know you've won a $400 million lottery. If you don't make each and every one of them a millionaire, they will be very disappointed. And you can't do that on $7 million. You have more relatives than you realize. You can set up large trusts for your children, but what about your grandchildren, nephews, siblings, and cousins? None of them will understand why you have to draw a line somewhere. You can hand out $10,000 at a time, but there will be at least one of your grandchildren and quite a few cousins who will spend it within weeks and come back for more. For years. Until they hate you, and vice versa. Of course, not all of your relatives are like that, but you don't know until you are confronted with vast wealth.

Here's another scenario: Say you have four children, and you want to treat them all equally. You set them each up with, say, a $10 million trust that pays out when they are adults. Maybe even as an annuity. Then those children grow up. Child one uses the money to buy a house (or two or three), set money aside for retirement, put their kids through college, invest for their heirs, and doesn't brag about how much money they have. Child two gives the entire amount to their church, and lives a marginal existence while working a low-wage job. Child three never works, becomes a drug addict, and refuses to have anything to do with the rest of the family. Child four enjoys the money, becomes a real ass, abuses his household servants, and invests in third-world sweatshops. Are you now regretting your promise to treat them all the same and give them money you no longer control?    

Those of a certain age will also need to factor in how long you expect to live to enjoy that money.

Oh sure, it's fun to dream. The question "What would you buy if you won $400 million?" is kind of silly, because you could buy whatever strikes your fancy. A more thoughtful question is "What would you do if you won $100,000?" That takes some real decision-making skills, because it's a large but limited amount that will not allow you to quit your job forever. The idea forces you to choose the most important things to do with your money. I once had some great ideas for this $100K, but now it would be a simple case of paying off my debts and using what little is left over to help pay my kids' college tuition. My life would not change much at all, except I'd have less stress.

What would you do with $100,000? What would you do with $400 million: would you take the lump sum or the annuity? How would you handle distributing that money? The question is moot for today; the $400 million winner has emerged, and the Powerball jackpot sits at $60 million. Which isn't bad, either.    

The former owner of this treehouse had to be the most popular kid in town! It appears to be built better than a lot of family homes. We don't know exactly where this abandoned, Victorian-style treehouse is, but urbex photographer Drew Perlmutter took pictures from several vantage points to share with us, including the interior. It's a shame that it's no longer maintained for a child's use. The Spanish moss gives it an otherworldly feeling. See more pictures at HuffPo Home. Link -via Messy Nessy

(Image credit: Drew Perlmutter via Flickr)

Can't decide on a theme for your internet-worthy engagement portraits? Then just do them all! Jeff Grubb and his fiancee Stephanie did their own set of engagement pictures, using whatever clothing and props they could come up with and filling in the rest with Photoshop. The results are a lot of fun, because they reference many of their favorite movies. In case you didn't see all these movies, they are (from the top) Back to the Future, Ghost, The Shining, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Grubb posted 21 images in all, with a lot more films represented. Link -via The Daily Dot

(Images credit: Jeffrey Grubb)

The 1958 Steve McQueen movie The Blob was about as ridiculous as a B-movie could get. The monster from outer space was a living piece of jelly that ate people and grew, eventually eating half a small town. The film is also notable as Steve McQueen's first feature film. But did you know it was based on a true story?

Believe it or not, The Blob is based on an incident in the 1950s when Philadelphia policemen stumbled upon a quivering purple lump that had crash landed in a nearby field, as if Grimace had suddenly been stricken with bubblegut in the middle of a hang gliding trip. According to the responding officers, the mass was like a giant glowing jelly ball, and it left a sticky residue when touched, because of course the first thing you would do when encountering a mysterious Plutonian blob is shove your hands into it.

So, it was a fictionalized account, as we thought. It's just one of 6 Movies You Won't Believe Are Based on Insane True Stories you can read about at Cracked. The others include A Few Good Men, The Hunt for Red October, and others that have an even better true story behind them. Link -via Unreality

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My brother is a photographer by trade, and every time the family had a photo session, we would always include a "funny hat" picture to celebrate the end of it. Those are the best of the lot, if you ask me! Now that my daughter in following in her uncle's footsteps, she's doing the same. We always have enough funny hats around, but anything can be a hat -if you put it on your head. Or at least you can tell people that. In this video, Jeff Wysaski of Pleated-Jeans ventures into the world of music with a song about hats. Actually, it's more of a chant, but it is available to download. Contains NSFW lyrics. I may have missed it, but I don't think they included the regulation Pastafarian colander helmet, nor a tinfoil hat.

(College Humor link)

I had wondered what AMC was going to air in the weekend between the end of Breaking Bad and the beginning of the new season of The Walking Dead. They could do worse than connect one show to the other. It makes about as much sense as anything else in the two series!

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.

by Jeff Van Bueren
San Francisco, California

South American shower heads are sometimes of very unusual design (see photos). They often have an instant heating device that is attached by exposed wiring to a switch outside the shower stall. You get the (cold) water running and then flip on the heater device, which turns the water tepid or possibly warm, and then you cross yourself and step in.

Sometimes there are additional features, such as the light bulb shown in one of the fixtures here; the bulb may be there to indicate when the heater is on. (Presumably the heater element will burn out if it is on when water if not running).

The Experiment
The experiment consisted of taking showers using this equipment, and seeing if electrocution would occur.

The Results

As evidenced by the writing of this report, I am still alive. In 11 of 11 trials, my one-year, five-year, and ten-year survival was 100%. This is an astounding, considering the frayed wires, cracked tile, lack of power surge protection, and erratic water pressure involved.

Followup
Ten years after the experiment, this researcher was conducting a retrospective analysis of the concept of “acceptable risk.” The perception of acceptable risk may be linked to age banding. For example, had I encountered these showers at my current age, I might have chosen to wash in the sink or to not wash.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the May-June 2003 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

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For some reason, I always thought there was just coffee, and then there was coffee with other stuff in it. This mental_floss video features guest host Wheezywaiter from The Gaslight Coffee Roasters in Chicago, who knows a lot more about coffee than I do. Since this is not a Starbucks video, I still haven't found out whether there is any coffee in a Pumpkin Spice Latte. -via mental_floss

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The guys at Brunswick Project were inspired to give Max-Arthur, also known at the Shark Cat, a soundtrack of his own. -via Tastefully Offensive

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What theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has contributed to our body of knowledge fills many volumes. A good short course is his most popular book, A Brief History of Time. But if you never get around to even that much, here's the sound bite version of Hawking's biggest ideas in an animation from the Guardian's "made Simple" series. Who knows? This might inspire you to pick up the book! -via Brain Pickings

This morning we read that George Harrison, then unknown in the U.S., was introduced in Illinois as "the Elvis Presley of England." Such metaphors can help us explain unknowns by relating them to what is known. However, modern Twitter users sometimes go overboard or completely out of bounds when making up metaphors.

The map called metropho.rs has a lot of those Twitter metaphors about places stored in its interactivity. Zoom in our out, and click on a place to read what Twitter users are comparing it to. A sampling:

I've heard worse -at least about Kentucky. You should read what they say about Florida! What are they saying about your home state/city/country? Link -via Metafilter

(Image: David Bachrach/Library of Congress)

For a long time, it was thought that there was only one existing photograph of President Lincoln at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19th, 1863. As you can see, it's a shot of the dignitaries on stage, taken by David Bachrach (interactive graphic #3 identifies many of the people in the picture).

But Bachrach wasn't the only photographer at the event. Alexander Gardner and his crew were there, and made an experimental "stereograph" photo of the crowd. A picture was taken from two slightly different vantage points, with the aim of showing them together through the left and right eye for a 3D effect. With the technology of the time, they could have been taken several minutes apart. In 2007, John Richter identified Lincoln in the background of the stereograph photos. Now there were three photographs of Lincoln at Gettysburg!

(Image: Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress)

Then enter UNC-Asheville media teacher and former Disney animator Chris Oakley. A longtime Civil War buff, Oakley took a new look at Gardner's crowd photographs. He and his students have spent the past two years analyzing the pictures and have found Lincoln, but in a different spot. To back his claim, the team used computer feature analysis of both the "new" Lincoln and the people around him to make identifications.   

Of course, to proclaim such a find, Oakley had to have the data to back it up. Oakley's quest to confirm one person in a large crowd shot is detailed at Smithsonian magazine, with an interactive look at the photographs. Link

Six actors, Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig, have portrayed James Bond in feature films (David Niven also played Bond in Casino Royale in 1967, but many consider that film "unofficial").

Redditor g_noodle combined Bond portraits of the six actors into two "transition" Bonds, with the three "early" Bonds (Connery, Moore, Lazenby) on the left and the three "recent" Bonds (Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig) on the right. Then those two images were combined to achieve a final combination, which looks like an actor who would be considered perfect for the role.

Who does it look like to you? Clive Owen? George Clooney? Mel Gibson? I still see Sean Connery and Roger Moore in this picture. The various steps in the process are shown in a series at imgur. Link -via reddit

Imagine getting a call saying you've won a Nobel Prize! It could happen -if you are among the distinguished scientists, economists, doctors, authors, and peacemakers who were nominated. And some of those people are waiting for the call. For others, it's a complete surprise. The Nobel Committees has an exact schedule for selecting the winners, starting the second week of October, with a different discipline announced each day. The Academy vote is at 9:30 AM (Swedish time), the call happens at 11:15, and the public announcement comes at noon (the schedules vary, but are always planned). If the winner cannot be notified by phone, the announcement goes on anyway, and the press will let the winner know. Professor Steffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, makes the calls for chemistry, physics, and economics.

…Normark has a strategy for getting his phone calls past secretaries. "We tell them this is a very important call. A. Very. Important. Call." He enunciates each word carefully before moving on to the clincher. "From Stockholm." So far, he has always been put through.

Normark says the best calls are a total surprise for the winner. And sometimes it's hard to track a winner down. But the Nobel Prize is special, even compared to honors that carry more money with them. Read more about how it's done at Intelligent Life. Link  -via Digg

(Image credit: Noma bar)

It's once again time for our collaboration with the wonderfully entertaining What Is It? Blog. Do you know what the pictured items are? Can you make up something totally wacky? That's what we're looking for: the funniest and most creative guesses. We will award t-shirts from the NeatoShop to two commenters who post the cleverest, funniest, or most outlandish uses for this thing!

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many guesses as you'd like in separate comments. You have until Saturday this week to come up swith great guesses.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, see? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

See, you don't have to know the answer to win! And remember, there are more mystery items to figure out at the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: it will be another day before the official answers are posted at the What Is it? blog, but since we wanted funny-but-wrong answers, we'll go ahead and award the winners. Erin Werra said, "These are the score cards the Russian judges WANTED to use at the Olympics. They're mounted on handy "persuasion tools" to encourage other judges to lower their scores as well." That one deserves a t-shirt! Randall had a great answer, too: "Gopher traps. Among the animal kingdom, gophers are statophiles, they love esoteric information and are fascinated by trivial numbers. When these are placed in a field inhabited by gophers, the little rodents will burrow right up to the number to read it (they are slightly nearsighted) and POW! it kills them with the spring loaded spike." So Randall gets a t-shirt from the NeatoShop, too! The answers to this and the other mystery items of the week will be posted at the What Is It? Blog on Sunday, and I'll update the contest post then.