Archive for January, 2023
Odds of winning the lottery versus being impaled by an icicle
The odds against winning today’s $1+ billion Mega Millions come to over 300 million to 1. According to these statistics from the National Weather Service, the chances in being hit by lightning strike in any given year are far greater—about 1 in a million.
Being in the dead of winter, I’m more worried about the icicles hanging over our walkway.
I cannot find any ‘official’ statistics on the odds of dying from one of these frozen daggers, but it must be on par with winning the lottery.
Though it makes far more sense for me to invest in a helmet rather than the Mega Millions, I bought 5 tickets just to participate in the dream. It’s fun doing something irrational every so often!
To get the math on the odds and tips on improving them (such as: pick at random!), see this post by Davidson College Professor Tim Davidson.
Smoot points about measurements
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on January 4, 2023
Does it really matter that the calendar turned over from December 2022 to January 2023? From where I sit nothing much changed from one day—12/31/22—to the next—1/1/23. It’s just as cold here in Minnesota—below freezing (32 F or 0 C: Take your pick). Must we pay any attention to an irrelevant measure of time passing by? Of course, the answer is “yes” for everyone to party on a timely basis for the New Year, birthdays, and anniversaries. However, I feel badly for my niece’s daughter born on Leap Day 2020—no 1st birthday until 2024. That’s a measurement failure. Anyways, Happy New Year!
Also, why do we continue to favor English versus metric units here in the USA? That is a huge waste! Let’s begin the conversion by expanding the football fields to 100 meters. The players won’t even notice the 10 percent increase in required effort. My feeling is that this will be the breakthrough to the far more sensible and scientific metric system—a movement that seemed certain to succeed when Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. Unfortunately, this became a political football when folks here in the Midwest resisted being told to post their distances in kilometers rather than miles.
The silliness of the archaic English anthropometric measures, such as height in feet and quantities of spices in pinches, came to a head in 1958 when frat brothers from MIT flipped a pledge named Oliver Smoot over-and-over the length of the Mass. Ave. bridge for a total of 364.4 Smoots (plus “one ear”*). In 2016, the MIT Alumni magazine published this April Fool’s joke that the Institute planned to recalibrate the Smoot to its namesakes current height (presumably a bit shrunken by the decades). What I find most interesting is that Smoot later served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute and president of the International Organization for Standardization. He went all out, literally, for the sake of measurements!
By way, it snowed 4 and 3/16ths of an inch yesterday according to my double Helix measuring ‘stick’. For my own purposes, I always use the metric side of this ruler—much preferring its decimal system (m/cm/mm, etc.) over the cumbersome fractions of inches. But to keep things simple, I pay the teenager next door by the inch.
PS It snowed another 6 inches overnight, bringing the total to 25 cm or so (deliberately mixing measurement scales to make my point). In any case, I need a taller ruler!
*Per Smoot in this 1995 interview. I first heard of him from the November 21st Wall Street Journal review of “Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants.” For details and reader ratings (assuming you like accurate measurements!) of this new book, I recommend you go to this Goodreads site.