It occurred to me today that fifty-fifty is really half and half.

Way back in the early days of this writing adventure that I started, many days ago, I wrote a couple of posts, back to back, that discussed the lesson that I’ve learned from Sudoku (you can find those posts HERE and HERE, if you’re interested). Sudoku is part of my daily routine; I complete at least a couple of puzzles everyday. Normally, if the Sudoku puzzle from my daily Sudoku calendar doesn’t challenge me for very long, I move to a puzzle from a book called “Master Ninja Sudoku”, by Frank Longo.

The thing about the puzzles in Mr. Longo’s book is that, often times, I will reach an impasse in trying to solve them. It’s at this point, when all of the tricks that I know for solving a puzzle have gotten me as far as they’re going to, that I need to make a guess on one of the squares. And once I do, assuming that I’ve guessed correctly, it’s all that I end up needing to move forward with finishing the puzzle.

I try to avoid guessing on squares until I am absolutely sure that the square is one of only two possibilities. That gives me a fifty-fifty shot at getting it correct. Of course, the other problem that I have is that I do my puzzles in pen, which means if I end up making a mistake, it’s going to be very messy trying to clean things up.

This morning, as I was finishing one of Mr. Longo’s challenges, I guessed on a square that was either going to be a 2 or a 3. I turned out to be right, and the puzzle unfolded right in front of me. As I finished filling in the squares, based on what I knew to be true from my guess, it got me to thinking about the fifty-fifty scenario.

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At the start of major sporting events (at least football games), you will often see that a coin toss will be a determiner as to which team gets to make which choice. They do this because you have a fifty-fifty shot at guessing which side of a coin is going to come up when you flip it. Sometimes, the guess will be right. Other times, the guess will be wrong. In a football game, the winning guess will allow the team to choose which side of the field they want to defend and/or whether they want to receive the first kick-off of the game. Now, at the end of the day, whether or not the guessing team gets their choice or loses the coin-toss is not a terribly significant part of the game –if it were that significant, we’d just record the result of the coin toss and everyone could go home (maybe they should play COVID football this way, less physical contact)– but it’s a fair way to make some of these decisions at the start of a competition.

One of the interesting things about the fifty-fifty guess is that half of the time you will be right, and half of the time you will be wrong. And, if you want to kill some time and dive further into this concept, sit down with a piece of paper and a coin sometime. Flip that coin fifty times, guessing heads or tails each time, and record whether or not you were correct. You may notice some interesting things. First off, I’d be willing to wager that your end number is probably going to look something like, wrong – 27 times, right – 23 times, and it’s much less likely to look something like, wrong – 7 times, right – 43 times. Also, you may notice that you can go on quite a string of correct guesses, every now and then. Such a series will usually be followed, at some point, with a corresponding series of bad guesses.

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Thinking about the fifty-fifty scenario got me to thinking about half and half.

I didn’t know this before I looked it up a minute ago, but half and half is 50% cream and 50% milk. The combination of the two gives you something that is not so thick and fattening, but it also gives you something that is thicker than the watery consistency of milk. Basically, half and half is an attempt to combine two things to make something new that carries with it the advantages of each of its component parts. A peanut butter cup is part peanut butter and part chocolate –> they used to market the peanut butter cup as “two great tastes that go great together”. Or, there’s Dove soap, that has moisturizer in it, so it cleans while it moisturizes.

I’ll bet you can think of your own examples of creations that have been designed to be a combination of two other things that are great when they’re combined together.

One of my favorite ways to do something like this is the portmanteau. If you don’t know what a portmanteau is, it’s the combining of words together to make new words. For example, did you wake up too late to have breakfast, but you’re hungry and you don’t want to wait till noon? Then you can enjoy brunch. Do you want to stay at a hotel, but you want your car –or motor– to be right outside your room? Then, look for a motel. Or, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can be more easily referred to as, Brangelina (at least back when they were together).

And, while many of these things are fifty-fifty splits like half and half, it is worth noting that we tend to do this a lot. If you want something to put in your coffee, but you don’t want to add milk and then also add cream –> go for the half and half. If you are going to use ketchup and mayonnaise on your sandwich, you might as well just reach for the mayochup (yes, it’s really a thing).

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I guess, in the end, the lesson is this: you try to do your best in life to leave as little to chance as possible. You try to make sure that you are making the wisest choices that you can, and avoid guesswork whenever possible. But sometimes, guesses have to be made because the best research and planning doesn’t account for everything.

When it comes to guessing, when you have to do it, sometimes you’ll be right and other times you’ll be wrong, just like it is day about 50% of the time and night 50% of the time. The day has its beauty, just as the night, but when you combine them into dusk or dawn, you get to enjoy the real beauty of the sunrise or the sunset.

Over the long hall of guessing that is a part of life, it all evens out (in the fifty-fifty scenario, at least); sometimes a guess leads to the day and sometimes a guess leads to the night. When you even out all of these guesses, over time, they lead to dawns and dusks that aren’t half bad in themselves.