Education Success?

I had the opportunity, in the course of answering a math-related question for my daughter, to see her Probability and Statistics textbook.

Is this what we are teaching our young people?

Success is “a person being murdered?!”

Is this a new educational directive?

No body left behind?

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Connecting Bytes

The Daily Prompt has challenged Word Press bloggers to analyze their top 3-5 posts and find a connection between them.

Since The Eye Life was hatched, here are the top 5 posts:

The Little Piggie That Should Have Stayed Home		2,835
My Lunch Bucket List		1,321
Youse Guys Ever Eat at Five Guys?		1,002
Signature Moment		841
Sponge Boobs		588

For those that don’t feel like clicking through the links, The Little Piggie That Stayed Home is a light-hearted post about my experience having several toe nails surgically removed.  I am a runner, and this activity is apparently hard on toenails.  But I think the number of hits has nothing to do with HUMOR or RUNNING, but rather visitors are brought there by Google Images–there is a picture of cute little toes decorated to look like piggies.  This picture has also been linked to Pinterest.  There are also before and after photos of my feet but I’m pretty sure that is NOT what has driven traffic to that page.

People love this pic!
The Blog–not so much!

My Lunch Bucket List is a post based on a Facebook posting of 100 Things One Should Eat Before You Die, which may include some things which might cause me to die if I actually tried to eat them.  The article is humorous and the title is an amusing play on Bucket List (things to do before you die) and Lunch Bucket (which implies foods.)  Get it?  Whatever.

Youse Guys Ever Eat At Five Guys is an amusing tale of my trip to Five Guys where I’m pretty sure there were a couple of women working.  This confused me, but I am easily confused.  Search terms that bring one here are led by FIVE GUYS.  Go figure.

Signature Moment is my tribute to our founding fathers and always gets a blip of hits on July Fourth.  GO FIGURE!

Seriously, if the Congrefs of today was meeting to pass this resolution, we all know what that would mean.  We’d still be British citizens.  God Save the Queen!

And lastly Sponge Boobs, which has nothing to do with boobs as a synonym for female anatomy, but probably benefits from searches for said anatomical parts, is about a study that showed that four year olds who watch just nine minutes of Sponge Bob (that’s two episodes minus the commercials) experienced learning difficulties.  I know!  I watched an entire Sponge Bob Marathon one day–but I did it at a Holiday Inn Express!

It should be quite clear what the connection is here between these posts.

They were all posted on this blog.

I’m sorry.  I’ve got nothing else.

It’s a humor blog, so I guess they have that in common.

Two are about food.  The rest, not so much.

Oh, and they all made this post about stats!  So they’ve got that going for them too.

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Powerball Numerology

You may not have noticed, but the Powerball^TM Jackpot is up to $600 Million ($376.9 Million cash value.)

The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 175,223,510.00.

They’ve got BALLS!

For the sake of argument, let’s assume everyone bought the standard $2 ticket.  That’s 300,000,000 million tickets sold.  The odds of winning are slightly less than half that.  Therefore, the odds of someone (or some ones) matching tonight’s drawing are actually pretty good.

I think most people buy a ticket, and then PRAY that those numbers come up.

Like any gambler, I’m always in search of an edge over the house.  Some of us are really poor at math, and refuse to be constrained by silly laws of probability that apply to the rest of the human race.  I hoped to find a way to PREDICT which numbers were going to come up, rather than sitting back and waiting and praying for them to match.  I wanted to be PROACTIVE!

So I downloaded all the winning numbers since 11/1/1997.  The numbers are actually listed in the order in which they are drawn.  I decided to look and see what was the average number drawn for each ball, fully ignoring understanding that the chance of any given ball being drawn at any given time is always the same.

I discovered something interesting–or not so interesting if you consider the Law of Averages.  A truly random sample over a large number of attempts will eventually reflect the underlying probability.  There are white balls numbered from 1-59, of which five are drawn.  There is a set of red balls numbered 1 through 35 which represent the powerball; one of these is drawn.  One must match all six to win the big prize.  So with an event that has an equal chance of drawing a number between 1 and 59, the average should fall between those two–roughly 30.

But when I did the calculations, the average number of the first ball drawn was . . . 27.

At first, this was a head scratcher.   If the odds are that the first ball will be less than the expected average, I may be on to something here.  Perhaps there is some variable which we cannot see or understand which keeps some of the higher balls from falling first.  Maybe the amount of ink on the ball–single digits have less.  I don’t know!  I am starting to tingle!

The lottery states that the odds of matching one red ball (the power ball) is 1 in 55.41 rather than 1 in 35.  It’s not because they are cheating, but rather that is the odds of matching ONLY the red ball, and none of the white balls.  The odds of matching a red ball are still 1 in 35, but some of those people will also match white balls, which makes the odds of getting only the power ball slightly higher or less likely.  But I digress.

After a little research, I discovered that the power ball drawing used to pick five balls from a pool of 55, rather than 59, and the power ball used to be drawn from a selection of balls numbered 1 through 42, rather than 35.

Twenty-seven is roughly the average of a sample between 1 and 55.  The tingling, it turns out, was from my butt going to sleep spending so much time doing these calculations.

So then I checked the other numbers.  The average number drawn for the second number was . . . 27.  The third . . . 27.  The fourth–and fifth . . . you guessed it, 27.  Damn you, statistics!

I can’t play a ticket with nothing but 27’s?

So then I reordered the picks into numerical order.  If the actual draw was 6, 23, 19, 43, 13 then the new array was 6, 13, 19, 23, 43.

So guess what the average lowest ball to be drawn each time is?

Nine.

The second lowest ball to be drawn?

Eighteen.

The third lowest ball to be drawn?

Twenty-seven–same as the overall average for the picks in order.  Do you see a pattern emerging here?

The fourth lowest (or second highest) ball to be drawn averages 36.

The highest ball drawn for over more than a decade of draws is 45.

A ticket with 9, 18, 27, 36, 45?  Try again.  That combination NEVER came up since 1997.

The stats seem to affect the Powerball a little more.  The average Powerball drawn is 20, which is higher than what you would expect for 35 balls (17 or 18 depending on how you round it off) but lower than when they used 42 (which would be an average of 21.)  That number will supposedly start to creep down towards 18 as more draws are done with only 35 numbers.

In the end, I bought a quick pick (letting the computer randomly pick my numbers since I haven’t the faintest idea what numbers to pick) and will spend tonight praying and promising God a percentage of my winnings if only He would let me win.

Six numbers for $600 Million?  That can’t be too much trouble for the Almighty?

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