Odds

[plural]

heard an
interesting tidbit today

from a statistical freak
who is blackmailing me
into referring to him as
my friend,
but as I really
respect him for it,
(the blackmail that is)
maybe we are
actually friends
after all

I am quite fond
of an old bumberstickeresque
saying

"the lottery is a tax
for people with
bad math skills"

so today
my villainous friend
informs me
just how bad of
math skills you have

apparently
were I to stand at the top
of the empire state building
and attempt to throw
a nickel
into a cup sitting on
the sidewalk below
without knowing
which side of the
building
the cup was
on

I would have better odds
of succeeding
than buying a
lotto
ticket

of course
while this
humors me
I make no claim
to its
accuracy

Comments

[strike-anywhere.livejournal.com]

Clearly he isn't as freaky as me, because he utterly missed the point.

When speaking of questions such as this, one must talk about something called 'expected loss' that is, what is expected loss (or gain) given a certain action.

There can NEVER be a gain for dropping the nickle off the building, because no one will ever pay you for it. In point of fact, computations that take into account winnings vs the amount needed to spend to buy enough tickets to reduce the risk to something losing to say 5% is a relatively easy calculation, and there used to be a group of investors in Australia who pooled their resources and did such analyses of lotteries all over the world...

They made a fortune.

Expected gain?

[plural.livejournal.com]

what
so this is
a selfish thing now?

this world
we live in
what a shame

what happened
to experiementation
in the name of science?

instead of
in the name of
glaxo-welcome

for fun
not profit
(or atleast for fun and profit)

those days
as a young child
when you first threw
a chunk of potassium
into the public swimming pool

that
is the
essence of
learning