simian

Here's how I treat any arguement I see placed by a Christian: unless they indicate from the beginning it is a joke, I assume they are serious. You may have already seen this posted at II:
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whosoever believeth in him would believeth pretty much anything."

Translation: There is no arguement too stupid for some Christian somewhere to use and be serious.

Simian

K

If order doesn't matter, then the odds aren't 1 in 1000.

The following possible combinations could all be reordered to 911.

119
191
911

Therefore, if order isn't taken into account, there are 3/1000 ways to get those digits.

Mageth

Order matters. A first ball is randomly selected as the first number, a second ball as the second number, and a third ball as the third number. I think each ball is selected from a separate set of (at least 10, and if more a multiple of 10) balls numbered 0-9. Humans don't choose the order. The same procedure is used every time. The balls came out 9-1-1, and the odds of that occurring are 1 in 1000.

Simian:

(about .998), still basically 1 in 1,000

Actually, 1.0 - .998 = .002, which is precicely 1 in 500.

Tom Sawyer

This reminds me of a story I saw once about all the coincidences between the assassinations of Kennedy and Lincoln. There was a big list of all the things that were the same between the two events. I can't remember any now, but there were about twenty trivial similarities.

The jist of the article is that you can find these coincidences between any two events that look like some kind of pattern, provided that you don't specify what those similarities are beforehand.

But of course, stuff like that doesn't matter and this is obviously interpreted as God (the xian one) giving his blessing to the survivors of the heroes of 9/11. Why He didn't get up off His useless cosmic ass and do something on 9/10 of last year is a whole other issue.

Kosh

BTW, here's the way I like to do it (I minored in Stats 20 years ago...)

Since each number is from a different pool, probability of each is 1/10.

Total prob is:

1/10 * 1/10 * 1/10 = .001 (for each drawing).

Same answer, but works good for numbers drawn from same pools. Note that if the pool was one big one of 30 balls, it would be different:

1/10 * 1/10 * 2/28 = .0007 !!!!!!!!!

edited to remove extra 0....

[ September 12, 2002: Message edited by: Kosh ]</p>

Wyz_sub10

...and many of the coincidences in that ("Lincoln had a scretry named Kennedy, and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln") are just plain false.

A popular pearl of wisdom in such matters is that great coincidences are not surprising. What would be surprising is if great coincidences didn't happen from time to time.

Kosh

Do you have a web page for that refutation?

Mageth

<a href="http://www.snopes.com/history/american/linckenn.htm" target="_blank">Snopes on the Lincoln/Kennedy "coincidences"</a>

Babylon Sister

One year on Columbus Day I wrote check #1492 for $14.92. Was that evidence that God was performing a miracle with my grocery list and the South Dakota sales tax system or just a really fun coincidence?