Me Knows Better Than to Say This… but I will. I need to tell an old story from a few years ago (I mean decades ago)… only because I want to. Many years ago, a tradition at work was to gather everyone for coffee on birthdays. The birthday honoree would secretly pick a number between one and a thousand. Each person in the group would guess the number and the honoree would say higher or lower as each successive guesser had to bracket within the last two guessed numbers. This would continue in a circle until the damned guesser would zero in on the number and once selected, the damned guesser would buy coffee for the entire group of participants in honor of the birthday person. For those that don’t understand the math above (that would be half of my followers in this case… sorry honey), it was not a good thing to guess the number. To explain it in simple English – don’t guess the number.
Well, on one particular birthday, the first damned guesser selected the right number immediately with guess number one. First guess… winner… I mean loser. Then without hesitation, the quality manager (the statistics guru, the knower of all numerical oddities, the seer of all future probabilities, the expert for all statistical advice) yells out, “Wow… whad-ya think the odds of that are?!”
Not that Jimmy is any statistical master here, but… ah… me believes it could be close to… let’s see… one in a thousand? Sound about right Mr. Statistics?
Apparently we hire only the best and the brightest here.
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