A few months ago, I made a post where I analyze the thought experiment from 4chan: there’s a giant floating hand that crushes a random person every day. How does history change. You can read my post here if you’re curious.
I enjoyed making the post and you enjoyed reading it. I want to analyze statistical oddities even more, so i picked two examples from the internet. The first one is a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s comic about math goblins; beings that mess with the universe’s logic. Here’s the final panel:
It sounds crazy on its own, but it makes sense if you think about it. Let’s start with two people in a room, Person A and Person B. Whatver Person A’s birthday is, they have a 1 in 365 chance of sharing it with Person B, or a 0.27% chance . I know leap days exists, but the odds of an individual being born on that day is 1 in 1,461 (0.068%). The impact it has on this experiment is basically non-existent, so we can ignore it.
Let’s add a third person to the room. We immediately go from one connection to three, which raises the odds to 0.81%. If we add a fourth person, we get six connections, so the odds become 1.62%. The formula to calculate the number of connections is “n * ( n - 1 ) / 2”, with “n” being the number of people. 24 people means 276 connections. Their chances are 74.52%. So yeah, the goblin is correct. And if you still want me to include leap days, the odds of just one person out of 24 being born on February 29th are 1.63%. It makes little to no difference.
Next up is the “Spiders Georg” Tumblr post. If you’re arachnophobic, stop reading this blog post. I warned you.
When I was a kid, I read that the average person eats eight spiders in their lifetime, which is a lot less than three spiders a year. Then again, I could be misremembering things. Let’s assume that the “three spiders a year” thing is true. How many spiders would Georg need to each to raise the average just by one? The current world population is 8.1 billion. George would need to eat 8.1 billion spiders every year just to raise the average by one. That’s 22.2 million every day, 924,658 every hour and 257 every second, assuming he never sleeps or takes a break.
What if he ate one spider every second? Again, if he never slept or took a break, that would result in 31.5 million spiders every year. The average person would only eat 0.0039 spiders. You wanna know the craziest thing? According to Google, spiders outnumber humans 2.8 million to one. Even if we highball Spiders Georg’s power and say he eats three spiders for every person on earth (24.3 billion spiders), it wouldn’t even put a dent in the global spider population.
After all of this, you’d think that the average math problem would be lot of fun to solve. However, examples like this are outliers and shouldn’t be counted.