Posts Tagged ‘Lottery’

You too can be a winner! (But don’t quit your day job…)

Monday, February 7th, 2011

I was surfing the web, and I was greeted by an popup invitation to enter the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.

I was tempted for a few moments to sign up, but then I saw a link to a page called “See Sweepstakes Facts.”

So here’s the question of the day — what do you think the odds are of winning the grand prize of $1 million a year for life?

The mind-boggling answer is:

Less than 1 in a billion.

As Mr. Spock would say: “To be precise, Dr. McCoy, the odds are 1 in 1,215,500,000.”

See for yourself.

Given that the current population of the United States is just over 300 million, I’m thinking I’ll stick with buying Powerball tickets…

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Posted in Thought for the Day | No Comments »

Lottery Hilarity

Friday, September 18th, 2009

In Bulgaria, on September 6 and September 10, on live TV, a machine picked the same six winning lottery numbers:

4 15 23 24 35 42

(Wow — it’s almost like an episode of Lost!)

An investigation is being launched — but you might well wonder if it’s really worth it, given that the second jackpot was under $140,000 total.  To add insult to injury, this princely sum had to be split up among 18 unbelievably optimistic ticket holders.

According to the BBC News:

A mathematician said the chance of the same six numbers coming up twice in a row was one in four million.  [emphasis added]

Link to Article

From this I conclude that one or more of the following is true:

  1. BBC News needs a better copy editor.
  2. BBC News needs a better mathematician.
  3. Bulgaria has some weird ass lottery where they leave out some numbers.
  4. You probably shouldn’t play the Bulgarian lottery.

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Posted in In the News | 2 Comments »

You can just kiss my Korean ass! Oh. Never mind…

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Because of an inferior printing job, a number of scratch tickets sold by the New York State Lottery looked like winners when in fact they, well, weren’t.

Perhaps the most disappointed ticket purchaser was a Flushing man named Hun Gun Byun, who thought he was a $2 million winner.  (I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Mr. Byun is Korean…)

Apparently, a two-digit number on Mr. Byun’s ticket was printed in such a way that only one of the two digits was visible, thus creating the visual impression of a winning match.  However, both the alpha abbreviation under the number as well as the ticket’s bar code told another story.

WCBS-TV reports:

He’s so distraught, he can hardly talk about it.

“I can’t talk about it,” said Byun.

http://wcbstv.com/seenon/kirstin.cole.consumer.2.752687.html

In other news, not one, but *two* registered sex offenders have won multimillion dollar jackpots in 2008, one in Massachusetts ($10M), and the other in Michigan ($57M):

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2008/06/mich-sex-offend.html

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