Luke Neale's Backgammon playing Mounty in Canada:
| I once met a Mounty in Vancouver who played Backgammon religiously; he recorded all the values of his dice throws in a small brown book. Over fifteen years of playing Backgammon he accumulated a large array of results, he then plotted these on a graph a came up with some startling results……. from his results he formulated a theory that: "luck travels in a wave pattern" he then continued to monitor his results as he played, and he found that as long as the person throwing was relaxed and in the correct frame of mind this was true……he went on to become a better player because he was sure that he could predict whether his (or his opponents) next throw would be high or low. |
From the Guardian Newspaper front page: Global Warming: It's with us now Tuesday October 31st 2000:
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[There have] been a number of unusual and record breaking "weather events" this year - for example the exceptionally warm winter and the wettest April since records began in 1766 - but this still [does] not mean global warming is here [said the Meterological Office] "It is the sort of weather we can come to expect, but we cannot know until this pattern is constantly repeated.".... Michael Meacher, the environment minister, writing in today's Guardian, says: "It would be very foolish to pretend every time extreme weather conditions occur , it is due to global warming. but the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme climate phenomena suggest that although global warming is certainly not the sole cause, it is very likely to be a contributing factor" |
From the Scotland on Sunday Newspaper back page: The past may find you out: previous performance is not always reliable for predicting what happens in the future Sunday November 5th 2000, regarding regulation on financial products adverstisements:
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In the mid-1980's, an academic from Exeter University conculded that relying on past investment performance had less chance of predicting future success than betting on greyhounds using the the winning trap numbers of the previous meeting. ....the Financial Services Authority has finally decided to [act]. After its own research this year validated that of the Exeter professor, it has set up a task force to probe the use of past performance figures in ads. However, a blanket ban is unlikely. Instead, the Past Performanmce in Advertising will "consider whether the rules need adjusting". Dont' hold your breath. The report will take until next summer, and perhaps a further year to implement. In the meantime, it is down to individuals to take care of themselves. |
Matthew Ferguson's story about the Lottery winner in Texas;
| Alexandra Ferguson, my mum, always was looking for a way to get rich and still is. One easy way to accomplish this is something everyone does at one time or another in their life - no matter how improbably impossible it is for them to win - play the lottery. My mum won around 3 times in her life (I forget the exact number) unfortunately all times she won no more than five dollars. However this is a huge victory in terms of probability for as she was complaining in an off hand manner on her luck, the clerk of the store approached her and with a simple remark changed her perception on her luck, "I am 80 years old and have played the lottery every week of my life and I have never won one penny of it back". The probability of winning the lottery three times in a lifetime is so far from believable and still it happened. It's amazing to think how close we came to becoming millionaires. |
An excerpt from Darrel Huff's excellent book "How to take a chance":
Huff tells the story of a run on black in a Monte Carlo casino in 1913:
| ..black came up a record twenty-six times in succession. Except for the question of the house limit, if a player had made a one-louis ($4) bet when the run started and pyramided for precisely the length of the run on black, he could have taken away 268 million dollars. What actually happened was a near-panicky rush to bet on red, beginning about the time black had come up a phenomenal fifteen times...players doubled and tripled their stakes (believing) that there was not a chance in a million of another repeat. In the end the unusual run enriched the Casino by some millions of francs. |
A true story about a van driver from Bristol by David Harris:
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The driver who moved my belongings to Bristol from London gave me a really cheap quote. When I asked him how he managed to keep his price so low, he told me that he had cancelled the insurance on his van. He reasoned that since he had made no claim for 25 years, paying for insurance was a waste of money. To me this seems just as wrong a piece of reasoning as believing that H is more likely than T after throwing three H's. My Professor at The Graduate School of Education disagreed: ...surely the fact that he hadn't had an accident for 25 years suggests that there is something about his driving which relates to not having an accident. Some people do have more accidents than other people. This situation seems different to me to be different from the situation of throwing a coin. WHICH OPINION DO YOU HOLD? |
The law of averages......By Ian Stewart from his book "The Magical Maze"
| The 'law of averages' asserts itself not by removing imbalances, but by swamping them. |