

What Are the Odds That a Given Cow Will Make It to the Super Bowl? - jason_tko
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/what-are-the-odds-that-a-given-cow-will-make-it-to-the-super-bowl/

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alexgartrell

      66200000 / 17420000 * 20 = 76
    

This article is only true if every cow hide's resultant balls are sent to the
exact same place. The superbowl could very well choose 76 different cowhide
donors.

    
    
      76 / 66200000 = 1 / 871 052.6
    

If that were the case, the odds would be (go figure) about 20x better of being
chosen.

I bet the true probability is somewhere in between

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fnid2
Also not all cows slaughtered provide leather. Usually leather cows are kept
in pins without barbed wire to provide better quality leather. That would
narrow it down even more.

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bretpiatt
Is it just me or did they miscalculate the odds here by trying to tell a
story? It seems the only things that matter are:

    
    
      # of cows slaughtered annually: 66.2M / 1.99 =  33,266,331.7 
      # of footballs made per cow: 20
      # of footballs used in the Super Bowl: 76
      # of cows required to make the SB balls: 76 / 20 = 3.8
      Odds a randomly slaughtered cow becomes a SB football = 33,266,331.7 / 3.8 = 1 in 8,754,297.82
    

What am I missing?

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alexgartrell
They're talking about the probability of _any_ cow being a super bowl
football. Not of any slaughtered cow.

The fact that half of call cows get slaughtered is pretty irrelevant.

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CoreDumpling
Related:

"... Thus there is a 1.8% chance that none of the molecules you are (still)
holding in your lungs came from Caesar's last breath. And there is a 98.2%
chance that at least one of the molecules in your lungs came from Caesar's
last breath."

\--John Allen Paulos, _Innumeracy_ (1988) [1]

[1]
[http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/archives/001392.htm...](http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/archives/001392.html)

