Chance of winning lottery vs. chance of being pummeled by co-workers

It's lottery fever out here in the northwest as the Mega-millions pushes past $200 million bucks. My co-workers went in on some tickets as a group last week. Each person put in $5, and I put in $1. Why did I only put in $1? So I could be included in the fun and then on Monday wave 4 dollar bills around singing "Look what I have that you don't!"

After I caught my breath from all the running and singing, I explained that their chances of winning are as close to zero as anything might practically be. They countered with "Well, someone will win!" To which I replied, "Maybe so, but that person will not be you." They don't seem to grasp the difference between the chance of someone winning, and the chance of they themselves winning.

Anyway, I've been banned from their lottery group because I have "Bad vibes" which they feel caused them to loose last week. One of them called me neurotic, one said that I do not understand statistics, and one said that I don't understand the role of faith!

What do I understand? Let's see... 56 numbers, 5 positions, and one power multiplier which can be a number from 1 to 46.
So N=56, K=5...

46 * ( N! / (N-K)! ) / K! = 1 in 175 million.

Behold! The tax on people bad at math! Next week, they will be devising methods for determining if someone is a witch. It probably has to do with the ability to float... like, for example, small stones or ducks.

How to Weave YR into the Very Fabric of Life.

So I was thinking... with disk drives having a finite lifespan, and DVDs only lasting about 100 years, how can we preserve this blog for, say, 200 million years? That's when I found this article about genetic tom-foolery from Pacific Northwest National Lab.

"We [are] taking advantage of a time-tested, natural, nanoscale data storage technology perfected over the last 3 billion years."

Encode our blog into the DNA of a robust species! Take that Zip drive!
Now imagine for a sec... the DNA of more species is being decoded every day, what if some gene googler discovers a message in the "junk" DNA of a weed or a bug? Ferns and horsetails are ancient, pre-dating dinosaurs. Perhaps they would contain a message from a fallen civilization millions of years in the pre-homo-sapien past? It would be insanely hard to decrypt, but would that not be the coolest? Someone write a sci-fi novel on this so I can read it. Thanks.

Yoshirap Around the World

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Unleash This

To continue with the SW theme, I predict this is the game that will push me over the edge into Xbox 360 land.

Happy Artificial Holiday!

The Knack