Re: [9fans] thoughs about venti+fossil

["Bruce Ellis" <bruce.ellis@gmail.com>]

did you miss the 2^90?  rather a lot really compared to lottery (~2^24).

brucee

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 3:04 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote:
> * geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com <geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > >From the fortune file:
> > You are roughly 2^90 times more likely to win a U.S. state lottery
> > *and* be struck by lightning simultaneously than you are to encounter
> > [an accidental SHA1 collision] in your file system.  - J. Black
>
> Well, cracking the lottery jackpot happens quite often (if people
> would buy as many lotter tickets as we've got disitinct data
> blocks as we have in larger data storages or network traffic
> over several years, it would happen very regularily).
> Even the amount of lottery players in a smaller city with quite
> low incomes (so people can't afford playing regularily) is quite
> small (compared to the rest of the country). The chance of being
> resident in one specific of these small cities is also quite low.
> About one or two years ago, it happened that someone in my city
> cracked the jackpot.
> Now let's imagine, how many people of those who use to play lottery
> (in my family, there's exactly 1 - people who play lottery most
> likely have to believe there's a chance to win or simply don't
> know how to spend their money, also a quite small percentage of
> the population) don't want to have the price (for themselves) ?
> Exactly this happened here.
> And now take those people (winning, but don't want to have the price)
> and let's see who many of them even don't want to donate their win
> to certain projects (neither funding, science or social projects),
> especially in an region where social projects are *very* needed but
> are dramatically underfunded (eg. very bad financial situation of
> medical or social care facilities) and many people are even too
> poor for giving their childs appropriate food and clothes.
> Exactly this happened here: the winner really *refused* the win
> and so gave it away to the lottery company.
>
> I really can't say, how low the probabily for such events is,
> but I suspect, it's *extremly* low. Although I know really a lot
> of people, I cannot imagine a single one who might probably even
> think about such an decision.
>
> IMHO, such an event (winning && in my local city && refusing the win
> && the regional public and personal povery) is nearly impossible.
> BUT: it really happened !
>
> So we've seen again: statistics are *never* reliable. It only helps
> for vague decisions on very large masses, never for a single case.
>
>
> cu
> --
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>  Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
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