Monday, May 12, 2008

Incredible Odds

So, this evening Mom was showing Michael and I a game Rachel likes to play to practice her multiplication tables. She asks a question that is answered by a number, rolls two twelve sided dice, multiplies them, and that's the answer to her question. So anyways, mom was demonstrating this, and she used "How many legs does an octopus have?" and the dice came up 1 and 8. That, my friends, had an odds of 1 to 144 of happening. And the fact that it was right only made it creepier. But, as I like to say, odds are only odds. Aye, I love it when the dice fall my way. It's lucky. Of course, there's not actually such a thing as luck. It's mostly providence or physics. But, I guess you could call it luck. It doesn't really matter. As long as I know what you're talking about, you can call it pustaped for all I care. And, as long as I'm talking about luck, I find that my own is often increased after uttering the phrase: "For death and flippin glory!" I ought to do some serious experimentation on that. That reminds me about Ben's flippin toyoda. But, that's another post. Later

-End Transmission

4 comments:

Michael Swift said...

These physicists made a machine that would flip a coin and get heads every time. Cool isn't it! If you knew everything about the starting conditions of a die roll (their position when your mom picked them up, exactly how she shook them, the air currents at that particular time, the friction between the dice and the table, the elasticity of the collisions, etc) you could predict the die roll. In practice, that's too many variables, which is where our concept of randomness comes from.

BTW, I was thinking about the odds when I was going to sleep last night: there's actually a 1/36=2.8% chance of rolling a product of 8 on two twelve-sided dice. Out of the 144 possible rolls, 4 of them (1 and 8, 2 and 4, 4 and 2, 8 and 1) have a product of 8. 4/144=1/36=2.8%. Rolling a 1 and an 8 has a 2/144=1/72=1.4% chance of happening. It's still more likely your mom rigged the dice. ;-)

Michael Swift said...

You know, the above comment is an example of why I don't have a blog. Would you read a blog made up entirely of stuff like this?

The Highland Sage said...

Well, I might actually. Not as light reading, but it certainly was entertaining.

Thomas J. Willis said...

As far as luck goes, it all depends on how you look at it, and what you define "luck" as. One person's miracle is another person's luck, it just depends on what you believe. It's all semantics.