think it's ridiculous, but you have to dream big," Drew Gentsch, a Des Moines, Iowa, attorney who bought a ticket Monday, told the AP. "The odds of winning are so low, there's no real reason to play. But it's fun to do so once in a while."

The news agency adds:

"The large Mega Millions prize is the product of a major game revamp in October that dramatically lowered the odds of winning the jackpot. If a winner isn't selected Tuesday night and it rolls over past the next drawing scheduled Friday night, Otto predicts the jackpot will reach $1 billion — an unheard of amount for Mega Millions or Powerball, the nation's two main lottery games."

A winner Tuesday could either take the $636 million prize over a 30-year periodSocial Solidarity

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was born in the northeastern French town of Épinal. He came from a long line of French Jews, though he would only go to rabbinical school for a few years before denouncing religion. Always a gifted student, Durkheim entered the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in 1879, studying the classics and reading early social theorists like Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte, who pushed early on for more scientific approaches to understanding social behavior. Disappointed with the French academic system, which had no social science curriculum, Durkheim taught philosophy in France before moving to Germany and completing his dissertation in 1886. Durkheim’s dissertation later became The Division of Labor in Society, forever setting a high benchmark for sociology graduate students after him. In 1887, he married