Once I was playing poker with 6 other friends. To decide who went first we spread the cards out and had people grab a card. People grabbed a card in no particular order. When we turned them over the cards were A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8 of spades. To make it even stranger the cards were in order around the circle.
At great risk to my person, I would suggest that the formation of human life as we know it currently could rank right up there. Of course, the day that a similar lifeform is discovered in some distant galaxy may shorten the odds.
Quoth cornflakes
Well, we don’t have enough data points to really say what the distribution is for ultra-high energy cosmic rays, but from what we can see, the Oh My God particle wasn’t something totally mystifying. It’s certainly impressive, but we’ll probably see more that are even faster in our lifetimes (using much larger detectors).
Should we definitely turn this into a Grat debate using maths nitpicking 
?
I think (influenced by that probability theory book) that the odds for coincidences of the kind mentioned do happen are not too bad; it’s unlikely that they happen to a prticular person, but it’s almost 100 per cent certain that they happen to anybody. The thing is: Even if the chances something really wicked happens to you are, say, one millionth of a per cent, which means the chances it won’t happen to you are 0.99999999, this means that the chances this will not happen to any of the 270 million Americans* are 0.99999999[sup]270,000,000[/sup], only 6.7 per cent. So the chances it does happen to anyone in the U.S. are 93.3 per cent. What I want to say is: The fact that there is an American (Mr Sullivan) who survived seven lightnings is much, much more probable than the opposite, the event in which there is no American to whom this occurred. So Mr Sullivan’s story is not really worth telling - the opposite would be.
The development of human life story does IMHO not qualify for the award; our planet had got several billion years time to do it.
Funny thing about this story is, often these kinds of “what are the odds?” stories are used by religious folk to say “so it has to be God”, so then of course in this case I guess God is saying we shouldn’t go to church 
my OP was trying to find the point between probable and improbable as directly observed. The reason for this was that some folks would say that because human life forming as it is on this planet is SO unlikely that it COULDN’T have happened. Does anybody know if its possible to calculate the likelihood of life coming to be as it did?
What are the odds that Ted Kennedy is still alive?
Now THAT boggles my mind.
I remember someone, possibly Bob Costas, claiming that the most impressive baseball record ever was Ted Williams reaching base safely in 16 consecutive at-bats, which I also believe he did in the same season DiMaggio had his hit streak.
He described the odds of William’s feat at several billion to one.
Not quite as amazing as the others here, but it’s hard to believe that Adams and Jefferson died on the same day. Independence Day!
barton You are correct about Ted Williams holding that record. The fact that Frank Thomas did it 15 times just a few years ago might indicate that the odds, while high, are getting smaller every day.
I’m sure that Bob Beamon, who broke the world long jump mark by about 2 feet at the 1968 olympics figured he’d own that mark more than the 23 years he did.
See, that’s the thing. If you accept the odds given about the odds of getting hit by lightning, and assume that previous strikes are no factor in the odds of being struck again, then the odds of getting hit by lightning 7 times are much less than one millionth of one percent.
(also ignoring things like holding a lightning rod on the roof of a really big building)
Specifically: (1/600000)[sup]7[/sup]= 3.57x10[sup]-41[/sup] is the chance of any one person being hit 7 times.
Now multiply by everybody on the earth (6 billion, is it now?) and you get a 2.14x10[sup]-29[/sup]% chance of anybody on the planet being hit that many times.
Now, if you figure in all the dead people in recent history–or at least recent enough for their story of being hit 7 times to reach us–the odds go way up, though I doubt enough to qualify it as a probable event (or even anything other than freakish). Of course, you have to figre in the fact that lightning has this unfortunate habit of killing people it hits, so every strike increases the odds that you’re dead–thereby decreasing the odds that you’ll be hit again.
(now I sit here and wait for the inevitible pointing out that I screwed some math up, or logic. Sigh)
Not did John Adams and Thomas Jefferson die on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that they brought about, but furthermore James Monroe (the last Jeffersonian president) died on July 4, five years later in 1831.
For me, the most excellent victory against the odds is the distance of the earth from the sun. If Earth’s orbit were 2% closer, all water would vaporize. If only 2% farther, all water would freeze. We just happen to exist within the very narrow band where liquid water, and life as we know it, is possible.
If religious believers of any persuasion find that contemplating such a fact strengthens their belief in a benevolent Creator, it would be ungentlemanly to begrudge them such spiritual sustenance.
In New South Wales in Australia there is a National Park called the Wollemi National Park. Some ranger dude was hiking through when he saw a 40 ft tree and thought “Hmm, I haven’t seen that before.” He took a branch back to the base to show his mates and they found that it was from a tree thought to be extinct from the time of the dinosaurs.
Read about it on http://www.smh.com.au There is a link on the right to the “Wollemi Pine” story.
[quote]
Specifically: (1/600000)7= 3.57x10-41 is the chance of any one person being hit 7 times.
Now multiply by everybody on the earth (6 billion, is it now?) and you get a 2.14x10-29% chance of anybody on the planet being hit that many times.
[/quote ]
That calculation doesn’t work; you cannot simply multiply it by 6 billion. The exact chances this will happen to anyone on Earth would (using your given odds) be
1 - (1-3,57*10[sup]-41[/sup])[sup]6,000,000,000[/sup].
The 1-3,5710[sup]-41[/sup] is the chance it won’t happen to YOU, the (1-3,5710[sup]-41[/sup])[sup]6,000,000,000[/sup] is the chance it won’t happen to anyone, and 1 minus this is the chance it will happen to anyone.
Unfortunately, my calculator surrendered when I faced it with this task; I would be very grateful if anyone here could post the result.
It’s like the story about the fish who thinks about the question why there is water in the river he’s living in. The answer is simple: There’s water in the river because the fish is asking this question; if there were no water in there, this philosophical fish could not wonder about that.
I don’t think this is so extraordinary either; there are so many planets going around in universe it would be much more improbable if no single planet could offer the best-possible conditions to develop life.
Bob may know baseball, but he certainly don’t know statistics. The chance of Ted safely reaching base in any particular set of 16 at bats is his .483[sup]16[/sup]=.0000088, or about 9 in 1 million. But that is for one particular set of 16 at bats; Ted had 7,706 career at bats, giving him 481 complete sets of 16 at bats. But even that is low. Consider: every time Ted stepped up to the plate, the 9 in 1 million odds applied for the next 16 at bats. This means he actually had 7691 sets of 16 consecutive at bats. Multiplying the above stats, and the chance of Ted reaching base in 16 consecutive at bats at some time in his career is (.483[sup]16[/sup])x 7,691=.067, or about 1 in 15.
Oystaman, I couldn’t find the link to the story on the page you linked. Here is the link to the actual story.
The fish in water example that Schnitte relates is an example of what’s called the anthropic principle (or more precisely, the weak or local anthropic principle), if you want to look up more information on it. Add to that the fact that planetologists now believe that the “Goldilocks Zone” of liquid water is probably a lot broader than once was thought, and may even extend past the orbit of Mars, if planetary conditions are right.
Erm… At the risk of asking an obvious question, it wasn’t a fresh pack, was it? 
I have been dealt two pat royal flushes in poker in the space of two weeks. It has never happened to me again before or after, despite years of playing almost full-time.
The odds of being dealt a Royal Flush in 7-card stud are about 547,000:1.
I was in another game once when two players were dealt royal flushes in the same hand.
Most poker clubs have a ‘bad beat’ jackpot, which is one when you get dealt a hand of a certain strength and it gets beaten in the same hand. I won a $7500 bad beat jackpot once when I was dealt Four-of-a-Kind and another player was dealt a straight flush. A friend of mine won a bad beat jackpot when he was dealt a straight flush and the other player was dealt a higher straight flush.
I read a story a little while ago about a guy who lived on Prince Edward Island, Canada in the 19th Century. He travelled down to the Gulf Coast (Texas or Louisiana or thereabouts) on business. While he was there he got sick and died. He was buried down there, far away from his home in Canada. Some time after his death a hurricane came ashore and washed his coffin out to sea. Naturally, everyone assumed that it was gone forever.
Years and years later, his coffin washed ashore. Intact. On Prince Edward Island. Near the town where he had lived.
Last year, the local paper reprinted a number of historic front pages from the 20th century. You know, Pearl Harbor attacked, Nixon resigns, Reagan remembers something, that sort of thing. On the same front page as the sinking of the Titanic, they reported that someone had been dealt a 13-diamond hand at bridge (but foolishly failed to bid it).
I figured that was fairly rare. But then I searched on the web for a corroborating report and found this page with a report on all four hands being complete suits.