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One in a Million Miracles Happen 295 Times a Day In America

Rory mentions that many people think that because the odds are heavily against them that playing the lottery is just a waste of money, but he does it anyway, just to live under the delusion that he has the winning ticket.  Well, we all know that eventually someone will win that jackpot, but did you know that the Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one in a million miracles happen 295 times a day in America (see the August 2004 edition of Scientific America magazine for the complete article).  So next time someone claims that it was a one in a million occurrence, just remember, 294 Americans can claim the same thing for that day.  So a one in a million occurrence really isn’t that rare.
Published Monday, July 26, 2004 7:10 AM by donxml
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TrackBack said:

July 28, 2004 5:02 PM

Steve said:

To quote Terry Prachett, the million to one shot comes in 9 times out of 10 - at least in the movies...
July 29, 2004 6:03 PM

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About donxml

I’m an independent consultant, specializing in .Net solutions architecture, based out of New Jersey who also doubles as an evangelist for XML, Domain Driven Design, enterprise architecture and .Net. I do not work for Microsoft, the W3C or any other big company that you may know of (at least not yet). I’ve been an indie for over ten years, and although I’ve been tempted a couple times to take a job with companies like Microsoft, I’ve haven’t found something better than my current situation. I work mostly with the large pharmaceuticals that are based here in New Jersey, and usually find myself on long term contracts. Definitely not the prototypical indie consultant, but it lets me dedicate time to my non-income generating activities like the developer community stuff, plus financing open source projects like XPathmania and MVP-XML. If you would like to talk to me about doing some contract work, just contact me via the contact page. My rates vary widely, depending on lots of different variables, but mostly distance from Jersey, and type of work. Plus, I’ve been known to donate some of my code for various projects.
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