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1) A New York woman recently won a million dollars on a scratch-off lottery ticket for the second time in four years. The odds of that happening have to be incredibly slim.
They are, at more than 1 in 3.6 trillion. To put that in perspective, we’ve all heard about how reliable DNA evidence is and how it’s virtually impossible for two persons to have identical DNA. Well, the odds there are only about 1 in 3 trillion.
2) A 50-year-old man recently set a new world record for skydiving. Isn’t that just tempting death?
The odds here are better than you might think. The man’s name was Jay Stokes, and last weekend, he set a record by completing 640 parachute jumps from an airplane over a 24-hour period. Most sources say the odds of a fatal skydiving accident are about one in 100,000, so by jumping 640 times, his overall odds for the day increased to a little more than 1 in 150. And while those odds certainly won’t send me on a parachuting vacation anytime soon, Stokes finished the day with nothing more than a few pulled muscles.
3) We’ve posted before on the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, AL. What are the odds of a major airline losing your luggage for good?
A 2005 report indicated that 30 million bags were lost by airlines last year. That sounds like a lot, and it IS a lot, but it’s only about one percent of all the bags that they handled during those 12 months. And all but about 200 thousand of those bags were later reunited with their owners, so the odds of an airline misplacing your bag for good is about one in 15,000. Definitely room for improvement but it does mean that you’re more likely to lose your luggage than the airlines are.
4) What are the odds that Pluto will regain planet status? Don’t ask, we’re still too sad to talk about it.
Comments (4)
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Your stat about the same woman winning the lottery twice is misleading in two ways:
1. Rather than looking at the odds that she would win with those two specific tickets, you should look at the odds that she would’ve won twice among all the tickets she ever purchased (since you would be reporting the fact regardless of which two tickets she won on). When she won the first time, did she start spending a hundred dollars a week on tickets? That affects her odds of winning again.
2. Rather than looking at just her, you should calculate the odds that ANYONE would’ve won twice (since you would be reporting the fact regardless of which individual won twice). I don’t know how many million-dollar lottery winners there have been, but I would guess it’s in the thousands.
posted by howtolive.org on 9-12-2006 at 12:37 pm
It’s true that buying more tickets would increase her chances of winning but it would have such a small impact on her overall odds of winning twice, unless she purchased an insanely large number of tickets. Her odds of winning the first jackpot with any one ticket were 1 in 5.2 million.
As for your second comment, we were pointing out the odds of any one person winning twice and she was the one person we looked at for this situation. The odds would’ve been the same for any one other person, if we make the assumption that they purchased the same number of tickets.
To calculate as you suggested, you’d have to take that number of million dollar winners in other lotteries and figure out how many of them play again in future lotteries. And each of those lotteries would’ve had different odds. We were just looking at these two specific lotteries.
Yes, we’re making some assumptions here but it’s all just to point out how crazy it is that this woman ended up winning the lottery twice.
But we’d love for you to get the stats of all million dollar winners in past lotteries, find out how many of them played again in future lotteries and calculate the odds that one of them would end up winning again. We’ll be happy to share your answer.
posted by Will on 9-12-2006 at 2:32 pm
While we’re on the subject of pedantic overanalysis of an article that is clearly meant just to be fun, the second stat would not apply to our superskydiver! The 1 in 100,000 is presumably heavily skewed towards novices. I would assume that a great number of the accidents occur due to newbiness. So, if you skydive say 10 times, I would assume your odds go waaaaay down. Similarly, the 50-year-old’s odds were probably much, much lower than 1 in 150. That is all.
posted by Simon on 9-12-2006 at 4:38 pm
How about the odds that the skydiving man had an adreneline level approx. equal to that of the character in Crank, who’ll die unless he keeps his adreneline pumping?
I went skydiving once a couple of years ago, and I was on cloud nine for about three days because it was so unbelievably awesome.
posted by Kate on 9-12-2006 at 5:42 pm