The 3rd item on the list of life’s certainties should be that sleazy people play the lottery.
Even worse than the dickhead filling out a check in line at the grocery store is the douchebag scratching his head trying to figure out which lottery tickets to buy at the convenience store. Ahh, that feels better…
I just realized that I have never waited in line for a guy buying a lottery ticket to fill out a check…that would really put me above threshold. If he then turned out to be a rapist…OMFG
Statistically speaking, coincidences are bound to happen. I have no idea how many different lottos/games of chance there mighty be in between England and the US, much less the number of sex offenders that might play at any given time – or blind people, blonds, gays, blacks, what have you. But given both numbers it wouldn’t be difficult to calculate the odds for each group. Astronomical as they might be, fact is three (close) incidents do not a pattern make. I’m sure someone’s rolled a seven 20 in a row…yet the odds for or against him/her doing it again remain exactly the same.
IOW, one should expect coincidences to happen, but when they do, one should accept them as such as opposed to looking for some sort of pattern as an explanation. Yes our brains are wired that way, but we also know (or should) better.
Moral of the story? No need to be a sex offender in order to win the lotto.
Really.
OK, agreed, but how is the OP proof of randomness?
Good to know. I’ll remember that in the event I want to buy a ticket. 
It isn’t. It’s an example of the statistical certainty of coincidence.
Awesome. I just took a potential sex offender off the streets. 
Until your prison Bubba strikes the jackpot in your ass.
Which is why it is best to take the jackpot out of your ass before you become roomies with Maximum Bob.
Well, it’s proof that the universe isn’t completely under the control of an omnipotent and benevolent god. It’s at least partly random. Either that, or it’s completely under the control of a twisted fuckup of a god.
Now how is* that*?! It only seems to be proof that such a god wouldn’t agree with you as to how events should unfold. And I, for one, am very grateful for that.
Heff - “X is proof of Y” is often used (see this thread for examples) in a non-literal manner. I think you need your Colloquialism Meter calibrated.
What makes you think God fixes lotteries? This is evidence that maybe the Devil fixes lotteries. It seems a good argument for random chance. God might not allow playing dice with the universe, but I think that God allows for playing dice with dice.
Considering the guy’s crimes, is this really the most appropriate word to use? 
coughcoughhumorimpairedcoughcough
Let he who is without sin buy the first lottery ticket?
Nevermind read the whole thread before commenting, eeeediot
I was pushed out of the way in the queue by a woman who wanted to wave her hands mystically over the scratchcards so she could pick a winner by her awesome psychicness. Then she bitched about how the one she’d picked only had a top pirze of £3000. How I wanted to give her a lesson in probability.
Or that God has a cruel and quirky sense of humor.
Three similar stories in a world with billions of people in it is still just random coincidence. There are only a few people who have been killed by stingray barbs to the chest but that doesn’t prove that there’s some sort of stingray conspiracy.
Makes sense to me. If rape is a big problem in Alaska (which it sounds like it is unfortunately), you have a large pool of rapists in the general population to begin with, so it is not really that much of a surprise when randomly selecting someone out of a population that contains a large number of rapists leads to accidentally selecting a rapist.
Sort of like, if you were to do a lotto drawing in Portland, you’d be more likely to have a winner who was a hippie than if you did a lotto drawing in Nebraska.
Personally, though, I definitely hope there is some legal wrangling that can be done about this to make the drawing results invalid.
Note to self: By denying the stingray conspiracy, Wile E has revealed himself to be part of the stingray conspiracy.