When in Rome

This is brilliant. I just heard on the radio that a British peace campaigner decided to walk to India with no money and relying purely on the charity of those me met along the way. He said that he was warmed by the generosity of strangers in the UK, but when he hit the French coast of Calais he had trouble getting people to understand his concept. Well in fact, to understand anything at all .. wait for it .. he doesn’t speak French. Cold and hungry he was forced to return to the UK, where he now plans to walk around the coast of Britain instead.

However, he is turning that to his advantage by learning French along the way so that he can try again next year.

I wonder what happens when he leaves France? He’ll have to do a lap of France so that he can learn Italian, Swiss or German :)

It could be an urban myth but …

A 98 year old woman wrote this to her bank. The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in The Times.

Dear Sir,

I am writing to thank you for bouncing my cheque with which I endeavoured to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations, three ‘nanoseconds’ must have elapsed between his presenting the cheque and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honour it. I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my Pension, an arrangement which, I admit, has been in place for only eight years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account £30 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.

My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways. I noticed that whereas I personally attend to your telephone calls and letters, when I try to contact you, I am confronted by the impersonal, overcharging, pre-recorded, faceless entity which your bank has become.

From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood person. My mortgage and loan payments will therefore and hereafter no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank by cheque, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must nominate. Be aware that it is an offence under the Postal Act for any other person to open such an envelope.

Please find attached an Application Contact Status which I require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much about him or her as your bank knows about me, there is no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a Solicitor, and the mandatory details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and liabilities) must be accompanied by documented proof.

In due course, I will issue your employee with a PIN number which he/she must quote in dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have modelled it on the number of button presses required of me to access my account balance on your phone bank service. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Let me level the playing field even further. When you call me, press buttons as follows:

1. To make an appointment to see me.
2. To query a missing payment.
3. To transfer the call to my living room in case I am there.
4. To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping.
5. To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature.
6. To transfer the call to my mobile phone if I am not at home.
7. To leave a message on my computer (a password to access my computer is required. A password will be communicated to you at a later date to the Authorised Contact.)
8. To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 through 8
9. To make a general complaint or inquiry, the contact will then be put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service. While this may, on occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the duration of the call.

Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement. May I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous, New Year.

Your Humble Client

Is that statistically probable?

I suppose that mathematics is not everyone’s favourite subject, and I suppose a vast number of people consumed enough about it at school to pass exams and use an even smaller amount in their daily lives. However, it struck me the other night, whilst watching my numbers tumble around in the big glass ball and not get drawn to make me an instant millionaire in this week’s draw, that the two concepts of probability and statistics are so mistakenly confused.

The announcer gave each number as it was drawn and then went on to tell me how many weeks it had been since it was last drawn and how many times it had been drawn in total. I had visions of dedicated lottery players digesting this information, maybe even cataloging it so that they could make the best estimate of the likelihood of a certain draw next week. Except of course that this is flawed.

I said to my partner, “that’s it, we’ll just pick 1,2,3,4,5,6 next week.” Of course the instant reply was “hmph .. how likely is that. “6,776,934,060 to 1, was my instant reply”. Well, ok I had to work it out but you get the point. Oddly enough exactly the same odds as 34,12,7,40,2,16. I wasn’t done yet.

“Even if we win we’ll just keep playing those numbers forever”.

“But if we win with 1,2,3,4,5,6, they’ll never come up again”.

Another common mistake. Of course the likelihood of 1,2,3,4,5,6 coming up twice in two draws is exactly the same as any set of six numbers being drawn twice in two weeks; or in fact any two different sets of numbers being drawn in two weeks.

The probabilities are the same. Statistically over time you can look back and say it doesn’t happen very often, in fact it may never have happened, but that’s a completely different analysis.

I used to run a lottery syndicate where I worked and there were about 6 of us that picked six numbers each and we played those six games, each chipping in a pound each week. If any game won we split the winnings. Most people picked favourite numbers, birthdays etc, but one guy picked all of his numbers between 31 and 40. When I asked him why he said that if they came up there would be few winners because there aren’t any birthdays in that range. And of course he’s right.

Finally just to give a real world example, I worked in a shop in Australia and my boss (the general manager) and his boss (the managing director) used to play each week. One week the GM forgot to put the numbers in and, yes you guessed it, their numbers came up. They missed out on about 3.5 million Australian dollars and to make matters worse, no one won that week so they would have swept the lot. Needless to say the mood was grim.

After a few weeks they got back on speaking terms and decided they would start playing again. The GM says “same numbers”. The MD replies “hmph, they’ll never come up again. We’ll pick some new ones”.

And yes, they missed again as their old numbers returned within a matter of months. A couple of million missed that time. The GM resigned and to the best of my knowledge they never spoke again.

Now I should qualify that they were playing a systems entry where they picked 9 numbers and hoped for six to come up, but the point was that they got 6 numbers from 9 twice in 8 weeks. What’s the probability of that? Exactly the same as any other two winning combinations, same numbers or different.

Statistically, how often does it happen? And no the answer isn’t every 8 weeks :)