This post was supposed to be harmless fun, but somehow turned into a rant, and a boring one at that...sigh...
Okay, this blog is in danger of becoming overly weighty and portentous. Or at least, in as much danger of such as it will ever be. Time for some completely random musings.
Avacado pits should not be put down the garbage disposal. This may be the most helpful thing anyone will say to you today. No need to thank me.
Worst Christian bumper sticker ever sighted today, on a purple Corvette: "Don't let the car fool you. My treasure's in heaven."
I'm noticing more and more bad grammar in everyday life, and it mildly purturbs me. In order to more conclusively prove what a nitpicking jerk I am, I offer these examples:
In the trailer for the movie Stealth, spoken by Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx:
"It's so much different down here."
In an email from Neteller:
"UltimateBet has transferred $107 to you, and is now in your account."
On a sign at Quizno's:
"It's not soup. It's Quizno's soup."
Then how is it not soup?
I find it surprising how gas stations have so eagerly and completely adapted the Pay-At-The-Pump paradigm. Surely most of them have realized by now how many thousands of dollars they're losing on impulse purchases of Pez, lottery tickets and cheap but surprisingly tasty individually wrapped fudge squares by customers waiting in line to pay at the register.
Although I don't know if anyone does buy lottery tickets on impulse. To my mind it seems that lottery players make a conscious choice to ignore (or be ignorant of, which interestingly enough isn't quite the same thing) the laws of probability. Either you're going to go inside and throw away your dollar or you aren't, regardless of how convenient this particular establishment has made your fuel transaction. At least that's how I imagine it is with these people.
For you lottery players out there, I generously offer a free math lesson:
I don't know exactly how it works, but let's say the Powerball involves five numbers plus another, different colored number. Six numbers, each of which is between 1 and, oh I don't know, 60? Hang on, let's do this right.
Okay, a little research reveals that you pick five numbers between 1 and 53, and one between 1 and 42. Now let's say that getting only five out of six right still gets you a pretty sweet prize. So for our purposes, "winning the lottery" will mean getting five out of six numbers right. Oh, but it turns out that getting five out of six gets you only $5000 if one of them is the "powerball." That's not very impressive. And getting five right but not the powerball scores you $100,000. Life-changing, yes, but nothing anyone's going to put up on a billboard, especially after taxes. So no, to win the lottery, you've gotta get all six.
According to the Powerball site, the odds of getting all six are 1 in 120,526,770. That's an impressively large number, but as far as I can tell, one that someone pulled out of a ferret's behind. Any Ph.D's in mathematics out there can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure you calculate those odds as follows: 53 * 53 * 53 * 53 * 53 * 42. This gives you odds of 1 in 17,564,210,706.
* While I have no interest in making myself look smarter by editing this after the fact, I don't want to mislead my readers either. The Man's number is correct. See the comments section for an explanation. But the phrase "ferret's behind" is still funny.
Your mind cannot comprehend how improbable this is, nor can mine; it's just too damn big. Like the distances between stars, it doesn't fit in the human brain and so becomes meaningless. We just say, "Well, there's still a chance." Considering how often you hear statements like, "the Vikings don't have a chance," that assessment is, by any commonplace working definition of chance, completely false. Snowballs in hell are a lock by comparison.
In order to more approximately get our heads around these odds, let's consider the delightfully macabre possibility that you will die today. Today. You. Before you go to bed tonight, your life is going to end. Not very probable? True. The possibility most likely never enters your head. If it does regularly, I apologize for bringing it up again, but then this is nothing new for you so I'm sure you'll deal with it.
Boy, wouldn't I feel like an idiot if someone did die after reading this. But it would prove my point. Anyway...
Let's assume that you live in the US. Not an entirely guaranteed proviso, but a kind one since if we did this globally your odds would probably be a lot worse. In 1996, 6342 people died in the US per day (It was a leap year, if you're following along on your calculator). The population of the US was about 260 million. This puts your odds of dying on any given day at about 1 in 41,000. (Not bad, considering that gives you a statistical life expectancy of 112 years, if no babies were ever born in the US). Of course this is technically your odds of dying in 1996, but since it's nearly a decade later and you're now reading this (heaven knows why), I'm pretty sure your odds of dying in 1996 are close to nil. We'll assume the death rate hasn't decreased significantly since then, noting smugly that if it's increased, my argument is that much more compelling.
Anybody still paying attention?
Odds of winning the lottery: 17,564,210,706 to 1.
Odds of YOU dying TODAY: 41,000 to 1.
This means that it's 428,000 times more likely that you'll die today than win the lottery today. Or if you want to trust the Powerball website's number, only 2939 times more likely. Either way, if ever you do win the lottery, watch out for lightning bolts.
Isn't math fun?
posted by Josh Fuller @ 7:40 PM
11 comments
11 Comments:
Hi Josh- Don't be so nitpicky about grammar - you, even you yourself, misspelled avocado. Also, my Christian bumpersticker says "Life is Short, Pray Hard".
I suppose that gas stations have the pay at the pump feature to stay relevant. If they didn't have it, a lot of customers would not go back and instead frequent a station that did have pay at the pump.
I saw a bumper sticker once that actually said "Unlike the demon spawn in your car, my children are saved."
I almost peed my pants.
I see...the more tedious the subject matter, the more comments from people I had no idea read my blog. I feel so validated!
mme - Sound advice; thank you. What troubles me more is that I've also been mispronouncing it my whole life.
shootist - I almost jumped up and said, "You're right!" and sent you a package of Gummi Bears, but then I had breakfast and thought about it some more.
What you and I are both missing is that you don't have to get the numbers in the right order! So the correct formula is actually 5/53 * 4/52 * 3/51 * 2/50 * 1/49 * 1/42. Enter this into your trusty pocket abacus and what do you get? Er, yeah. 120,526,770 to 1. What can I say, it's just my day for comeuppance. I'd like to say I'll never doubt the federal government again, but that just wouldn't be true.
michael - True. Good to see that gas stations aren't following the phone company school of thought where the greed to customer satisfaction ratio is approaching infinity at a dazzling rate.
mbw - That is outstanding. Some truly great ones here. MME, maybe you could update yours?
fuckin - Uh...
Thanks for checking in all, and I will be spending some time on about 80% of your blogs in the future.
Though you claim that since X amount of people died last year that my chances of dying are then 1:41,000. Is the lack of responsible risk assessment glaring you in the face? My chances of dying this year are not the same as the next guy's--unlike the lottery. If I'm a defensive driver and buckle in, if I get my milk from Erik Wageman, if I do yoga, etc...my liklihood of dying isn't the random chance that the lottery is.
How silly.
And yes...that's "likelihood"...I seemed to have failed to press my "e" key hard enough as well as failing to proofread before clicking "send".
Yes, I wondered if someone would pick at my unstated assumptions. When you're dealing with probability you generally don't bother to state every tenet that must be assumed...asteroid fails to collide with earth, reader speaks English, etc. The general idea is to convery an average likelihood for the overall population; that's what 'probability' means. Besides, not all of my readers do yoga.
Well, a significant majority of your readers' likelihood of dying isn't anywhere near 1:41,000. You can keep up the curt tone all you like, but pointing out that likelihood of death is radically different within numerous demographics is just a wee bit different than, "An astroid didn't hit Earth last night."
Good lord.
Of course. The asteroid example was an absurdity meant to illustrate how many things one must assume in order to discuss probability at all.
The site I linked to indicates that 38,510 people died in their 20's in 1996. That's 1.66% of the total number of deaths. It would be interesting to get ahold of what percentage of the total population is in their 20's; obviously it would be much higher. Then you could get a rough estimate of what the odds for that particular age group would be, although it still wouldn't take into account the fluctuations based on differing dairy sources (see, you use absurdity in your examples too! It's fun!).
Since the point (misguided as it was) was to show how much more unlikely winning the lottery is than dying, a possibility that most of us never consider, I wasn't really concerned with making the latter number highly accurate. I just wanted to show how small it is by comparison. As you rightly point out, it is potentially much larger for some of us lucky ones, and unfortunately much smaller for others. But compared to 120,526,770 it will always look a little puny.
Word.
I have tried Quiznos soups and found them so yummy.
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