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This week we consider:
the Chinese zodiac
the longest queue ever
Lemar
premium cinema seats
stop-motion water
baby clothes
asexual koalas
Mike Leigh vs. Red Dragon
Les Miserables vs. Undercover Boss
Mary Poppins vs. The Sound of Music
Pete Doherty vs. Peter Brame
and
the point of kissing.
Plus: Olly’s going to build his business empire on XXX fortune teller fish, whilst Helen’s looking into a range of mouth condoms for slimmers; and Martin the Sound Man is a shrivelled little short tongue man. But at least he’s not the only one.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) is further contemplation upon the masterwork of David Sneddon, star of Fame Academy series 1 and AMT245. It’s a song which bears many hours, nay months, of interpretation. This week’s lesson: what’s up with your sleeves, Sneddon?
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See you next Thursday,
Helen & Olly
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Answer Me This! Podcast 
February 18, 2013 at 8:07 pm |
As someone who avoids the lottery because of the long odds, loves fruit pastilles, foolishly spent four years getting a masters degree in maths and is now immensely bored after being off sick from work today, this one piqued my interest.
This is best viewed as a series of Bernoulli trials because we want 13 out of 14 pastilles to be a given colour (1/5) and 1 to be some other colour (4/5). Long story short, the odds are about 1 in 109 million. If you demand proof, looky here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_trial.
Helen, Olly and Martin, thanks for keeping me entertained while I’ve been ill today. Getting off my tits on paracetemol wouldn’t have been a distraction for long.
February 18, 2013 at 8:19 am |
The lottery is 1 in 13,983,815. It seems there are 24 Fruit Pastilles in a pack of fruit pastilles. There are 5 flavours. If I’m right, the chances of getting all but one a single colour (assuming there isn’t any bias) is (1/5)^23. This is an absolutely staggeringly small chance. FAR rarer than winning the lottery… 1 in 11,920,928,955,078,125. 11 thousand billion.
I need to mention this as you were REALLY wrong with this one. Those odds are so huge I’m pretty much doubting this is chance. This is more than 1 and a half million times the amount of people living on Earth. In other words, you would expect this (statistically speaking) to happen once if everyone on Earth bought 1 and half million packets of fruit pastilles.
So yeah, either my math is WAAAY off, or this isn’t pure chance – or maybe this is an insane statistical anomaly.
February 18, 2013 at 8:49 am |
I don’t know how many there are in a bag of Fruit Pastilles, but we were assuming he had a tube, which has 14. How does that adjust the stats?
I can’t believe I’m even asking…
February 18, 2013 at 9:05 am |
Woops, I was actually going for a tube but I took the number off of an amazon page saying “Fruit Pastilles Tube (Pack of 24)” without realising it was 24 tubes. Well, it still works – 14 in a pack is 1 in 1220703125 (still way rarer than the lottery).