

Guns don’t kill people, puppies do - baha_man
http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/guns-dont-kill-people-puppies-do/

======
MindTwister
For the tldr; crowd, its basically about how given a big enough sample size
very unlikely things become a possibility, ex: you puppy shooting you in the
face.

~~~
rubinelli
An interesting -- and sometimes dangerous -- consequence of this is that,
whatever your position in a subject, you can practically always find an
anecdote that will seem to prove your point, if only you look hard enough for
it.

------
algorias
Summary: Having 3 children with the same birthday sounds like a 1/365^3
possibility, but it's actually 1/365^2, as the first can be any date, as long
as the next 2 are the same.

Add to that the amount of births per year per country, and it's not such a
headline worthy story anymore.

EDIT: fixed formatting

~~~
Retric
WTF? Where did you get 3652?

 _Their number is calculated as 365 x 365 x 365 = 48,627,125. But in reality,
of course, it’s out by an order of magnitude: one in 50 million are the odds
of someone having 3 siblings sharing one particular prespecified birth date
that the editors of the Daily Express sealed in an envelope and gave to a
lawyer 50 years ago. In reality there is no constraint on which day the first
baby gets born on, so after that, the odds of two more babies sharing that
birthday are 365×365=133,225._

~~~
gjm11
He tried to write 365-squared, but whatever he did didn't actually work and
the 2 that was meant to be in the exponent ended up just glommed onto the 365.

~~~
algorias
Sorry, I'm used to double asterisk from python...

------
dlsspy
Too many babies in the UK.

Too many puppies with guns in their hands.

Anything is possible.

