Pro - ble - bility
I am sitting here at the tail end of the “C” concourse, in the Chicago’s O’hare airport, just surfing my
eyes across the flux of people droning by. Based on very very cursory estimates, it appears that there are about 150 people just milling around, coming and going. If an Oracle crept up (as they tend to do) and said, “if you wanted to know any probability here, what would you ask”?
So would you appeal to safety, or sick curiosity, and ask, how many here have committed a horrible crime?
Rape, or victims of, afflicted with some insidious ailment, etc..
Would you look for pedagogical data, as in, what percentage of X represents Y?
What is the wealth, race, or religion, in some sick probability census?
How about forward thinking, as in how many people here will win the lottery, die from cancer, heart attack, or build their own multinational corporation?
How about toilet throne data, such as, how many people with moustache’s live: in this country, this century, hide horses, homosexual, or are women?
How about more humanistic data, as in, how many people wish you didn’t exist, or would become euphoric if you would only ramble up and say ‘Hello’?
The true error in the probability may seem overt, but would you really want to know.
If knowing that 32% of all people that were there in that terminal at that given time,
would become ecstatic if only you said hello, while 5% would be become
infuriated, what would you do? How about if you found that the people with
moustaches seemed to react more harshly? Would you avoid them as a
statistic, how about if they had a Yarmulkes on? Was scratching a lottery
ticket? or had been featured on America’s Most Wanted?
The problem is without the event it’s all just probabilty.
Lesser known facts:
72% - the number of Linuxers that are natural born leaders.
22% - the number of key designers, and programming genius introverts.
6% - the proverbial remainder of non-gnu eunuchs.
Sorry for the crazy post I was at the airport ALL DAY 
(hey its been awhile)
– tekgnu –
