5 ms·
>what are the chances that it was a random flyby? ~99.9̅% chance of being random. Absent any sort of evidence, it was a rare, meaningless event. The law of lar
by Afforess 8y ago
>what are the chances that it was a random flyby?
~99.9̅% chance of being random. Absent any sort of evidence, it was a rare, meaningless event. The law of large numbers, however, suggests that rare events occur more frequently than you'd expect. E.g 1 in 1000 year floods could occur 3 times in a decade, since each event is statistically independent from others.
- adwn 8y ago> ~99.9̅% chance of being random. Where did you get that number from? Because it looks like you made it up.
- Retric 8y agoThe odds of any one ticket being the wining lottery ticket is very low. However, with huge jackpots the odds that someone will win are very high. In other words the odds that that specific rock get’s that close is low. But, if we only observe rocks close to us then the odds that we will see a rock close to us depends more on the number of rocks than the low odds for anyone rock. More generally becase we notice unusual events more than common ones you need to consider all possible unusual events you would notice not just the odds of that specific event.
- lifeformed 8y ago99.9̅% == 100%
- dEnigma 8y agoGood catch. I didn't even notice this while reading the grandparent comment. But I've seen people debate this fact, or rather the fact that 0.9̅=1, for days and weeks on the internet.
- Roritharr 8y agoWow, you just pushed me and my girlfriend into a heated debate regarding this. Is there a list anywhere of similar unintuitive math properties/facts?
- lifeformed 8y agoHmm... I guess division by zero is sort of similar. And imaginary numbers? The wiki article has some good discussion on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...