Cosmo Kramer : Have you ever met a proctologist? Well, they usually have a very good sense of humor. You meet a proctologist at a party, don't walk away. Plant yourself there, because you will hear the funniest stories you've ever heard. See, no one wants to admit to them that they stuck something up there. Never! It's always an accident. Every proctologist story ends in the same way: "It was a million to one shot, Doc. Million to one!"
What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
141–150 of 199 posts
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#142Martians coming to Earth and, specifically, to the Woking area near London.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#143since we're having a bit of fun:
Mary: "I'd say.. more like one out of a million." Lloyd: (slowly reacts) "So you're telling me there's a chance? … yeah!!"
Dumb and Dumber (1994)
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#144Reminds 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.
I like the formulation, “at 100 rps one in a million is 8.6 times each day.”
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#145> "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'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by the implied slice shuffling in this "model". Lol! We need to think of another real world setting where a stack of randomly hole-filled sheets would be naturally shuffled.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#146> If we guess a President will serve on average about 6 years, then 1 in 6 times 4.0 million = 24 million babies will someday be President. This sentence desperately needs parentheses. Took me five minutes to parse correctly.
[deleted]
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#147Reminds me of https://markxu.com/strong-evidence «One time, someone asked me what my name was. I said, “Mark Xu.” Afterward, they probably believed my name was “Mark Xu.” I’m guessing they would have happily accepted a bet at 20:1 odds that my driver’s license would say “Mark Xu” on it. The prior odds that someone’s name is “Mark Xu” are generously 1:1,000,000. Posterior odds of 20:1 implies that the odds ratio of me…
24 bits seems about right for the information content of six Latin characters arranged in a pronounceable English orthography (the ‘X’ has pretty high information value though).
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically, it's not actually uniform, or "random" - it only has to be indistinguishable from random, e.g. if you had access to a true random source and a pseudo-random one, it should be computationally infeasible to distinguish them.
Given a finite amount of sample.values, you can always find a polynomial to match the values. You can only proclaim that something is "truly random" on epistemological grounds, assuming that true randomness is somehow exposed by the universe. This holds under quantum physics, but not under classical mechanics. Unless there is some quantum effect, RNGs based on fluid dynamics, like lava lamps, may be completely determ…
You're right that we can never find conclusive empirical evidence for something being truly random, but we can say with confidence that a PRNG is not random because we can look at the algorithm.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by the implied slice shuffling in this "model". Lol! We need to think of another real world setting where a stack of randomly hole-filled sheets would be naturally shuffled.
Punch cards? Might be a few years out of date to be readily imagined by an average member of the public.
Re: What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
#150Reminds me of working on a service with a huge amount of traffic
What I found interesting was how often edge cases would occur with that much traffic
Something that would be really difficult to reproduce locally would happen like 100 times a week if you looked at the logs