Red, Yellow, Green, Red, Blue, Blue, Blue

The first year I went away for school, we got split into groups for a massive "intellectual" competition. Building bridges, flying paper airplanes, coming up with good ways to do fun things. So my group was doing fairly well, and then we get to..the jelly bean competition.

You know, there's a big jar, it's filled with small pieces of candy of some nominally uniform shape and size, often jelly beans or M&Ms. The point is to attempt to guess the number of tiny pieces of candy in the jar, and if guessed correctly you win. Depending on the situation, the prize can differ. For example, in middle school this was a game at a birthday party I attended. Sadly, I was off by 15.. but the next closest was about 200 away, so I got a jar of M&Ms to call my own! Until all the candy was eaten and then I only had a jar until my mother decided to can some more fruit, and then I only had the bittersweet memory left. That and the glory. Can't forget the glory.

This time, though, the prize was more points for your team. Not that the points really mattered either, but it's the whole glory thing again.

So off we went, looked at the jar, smelled it, shook it some, used our x-ray vision and powerful math skills. Anything we could to get the correct number. Compare our answers, and decide which answer to use from them.

I learned one thing from this. Being able to convince someone you're correct is more useful than being correct to start with.

Well, that and you really need more than a day to eat a jar of M&Ms.