Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Lottery or Death?

An interesting comment was made by a colleague over lunch today: he claimed that you're statistically more likely to die within 15 minutes of buying a lottery ticket than actually winning the 6/49 jackpot. Sounds surprising at first, but the numbers do work out:

In Canada, the current yearly death rate is 7.73 deaths per 1000 population. While age, health, and lots of other factors influence that, you could still argue that the "average" Canadian has a 0.00773 chance of dying in the next year. That works out to a 2.118e-05 chance over the next day and a 2.206e-07 chance in the next 15 minutes. Or about a 1 in 4,500,000 chance.

Now the chances of winning the lottery? About one in 14 million

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