Reminds me of “one in a million is next Tuesday”:
https://jeffgarretson.blog/2014/07/17/one-in-a-million-is-ne...
Worth a read if you are an SRE.
What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
121–130 of 199 posts
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#122This is very cool, you have to try to pick a random sequence of 1s and 0s and then shows you how not random it is. https://calmcode.io/blog/inverse-turing-test.html
I passed everything up to and including the three digit sequences on my first try. 10 fail, 110 pass. I guess I'm random enough?
Did you ever consider becoming a software library when you grow up?
`from tasuki import random`
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it's a very small step to make babies amounting to 3 times the current population of Switzerland (so assuming roughly a 50/50 female/male divide, everyone needs to make 6 babies on average, in the same year so they will still all be babies when the last one is born? that's probably impossible for the females but we are already way into the science-fiction category) and put them all in a committee. The more…
What do you mean, "that's *probably* impossible" to make 6 babies from the same mother in a single year? Takes about 9 months to output a human, you know?
It’s not impossible to have sextuplets.
It’s probably impossible for a population to average that rate though.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#124On government insurance you have 1 in a million+ chance to be assigned an unbiased, compassionate to pain, not anti-engineer psychiatrist.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is part of a very important principle: if someone approaches you about something, you should be far more suspicious than if you had randomly picked someone off the street. The most well known application of this is teaching kids to ask a random shopkeeper for help if they get lost, but to not get in a stranger's car when offered a lift.
Also good advice for dating! If an attractive lady walks up to me at a party, first thing I'm doing is asking for references.
My dude…
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#126> "Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten." -- Terry Pratchett Making fun of the fact that if someone says "it's a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!" in fiction, you know it's going to work. In _Guards! Guards!_ this is taken to the point that…
TFA: "If you tossed the coins [20 tails in a row] then the first answer would be NO, unless I'm very confident you lack the ability to fool me … "
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is part of a very important principle: if someone approaches you about something, you should be far more suspicious than if you had randomly picked someone off the street. The most well known application of this is teaching kids to ask a random shopkeeper for help if they get lost, but to not get in a stranger's car when offered a lift.
Also good advice for dating! If an attractive lady walks up to me at a party, first thing I'm doing is asking for references.
This must come up a lot.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#128> "Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten." -- Terry Pratchett Making fun of the fact that if someone says "it's a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!" in fiction, you know it's going to work. In _Guards! Guards!_ this is taken to the point that…
The cheese-loving aviators have the Swiss-cheese-model to visualize how small unimportant errors can stack up to a catastrophic outcome. Though in my opinion there's a flaw in this thinking as no sane cheese seller would shuffle their layers of cheese after cutting them: Hence 1-in-million chances happen all the time. https://www.aviationfile.com/swiss-cheese-model/
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it investigated as a mathematical puzzle but there’s probably some interesting number stuff to be found in investigating the mathematics of an idealized swiss cheese risk model.
If you take a series of unit squares and from each one remove a random circle (ah, the origin of every protracted probability argument among mathematicians: a random circle selected from which distribution?), then stack them up… after n squares, what is the expected hole size? Or how many squares do you need to stack to reduce the hole size to below a particular threshold?
Circle intersection geometry is hard though. Probably easier to start with axis aligned square holes, which are what you get when you make your Swiss cheese out of milk from spherical cows.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
My chance of dying because of a dinosaur-estinction-event-class asteroid hit is one in a 65 million years, thus every two and a half days on average a random person on earth dies being hit by an asteroid of that size.
This implies that your death and all others are not correlated. I’d argue that if an asteroid hits the death correlation is almost 1.
I think that's what he's trying to point out
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are records of people killed by meteorites, literally in single digits. A simple statistical test would give you an idea. With 10B people on Earth, a "one in a million per lifetime chance" would happen to 10M people during their lifetimes. If we optimistically assume that a lifetime is 100 years, and the chances do not change with age, the event would affect 100k people every year.
Your calculation is wrong, there are a thousand millions to the billion. If there was a 1/1,000,000 chance across 10 billion people, it would be 10,000 people affected.
You are correct, and I am not!
Then the "one in a million per lifetime" chance would be an event that happens to about a hundred people every year, on average.
Winning a big lottery is within the right ballpark. Flying to space is definitely more rare.