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rhinoceros
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9-11 Lottery Number
« on: 2002-09-21 11:53:23 » |
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New York lottery winning numbers: 9-1-1
Source: CNN (from Associated Press)
Dated: 2002-09-13
ALBANY, New York (AP) --Officials say it was just a coincidence, but many people found it chilling nonetheless: On the anniversary of September 11, the winning numbers in the New York lottery were 9-1-1.
Lottery officials said Thursday that 5,631 people had selected the tragic numbers. They won $500 each.
"The numbers were picked in the standard random fashion using all the same protocols," said lottery spokeswoman Carolyn Hapeman. "It's just the way the numbers came up."
The 9-1-1 combination was picked so often, it reached the lottery's set limit for combinations and sold out by Tuesday evening, Hapeman said. On any given day, seven to 10 sets of numbers are "closed out," she said.
For the drawing, which is televised live, the lottery uses numbered balls circulating in a machine. When host Jolanda Vega pushes three levers, three balls pop up randomly. On Wednesday evening, there wasn't the slightest trace of a quaver in Vega's voice as she read out: "Nine ... one ... one."
There is a 1-in-1,000 chance of the numbers 9-1-1 coming up in the lottery.
"I'm a bit surprised, but I wouldn't characterize it as bizarre," said Christopher Rump, a probability expert at the University of Buffalo. "People tend to read into these things. I'm sure that whatever numbers come up tonight will have some special meaning to someone, somewhere."
Lottery players said the eerie number sequence didn't make them think the draw was rigged.
"It's not that unusual," said Bob Matusiak, who bought a ticket Thursday at a convenience store.
A similar coincidence occurred November 12 when the numbers 5-8-7 came up in the New Jersey lottery the day American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in New York City.
Lottery ticket vendors said some people seemed reluctant to try their luck on the sequence even as they bet on it.
"I think some people were disgusted with the idea of playing that number because it represents a black day in the history of America," Farzad Khosravi said.
Hapeman said Wednesday was the first time in more than a year that the 9-1-1 combination had come up in the New York lottery.
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rhinoceros
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Re:9-11 Lottery Number
« Reply #1 on: 2002-09-21 12:11:18 » |
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9-1-1 INNUMERACY
Source: Skeptic Newsletter
Author: Paul M. Amore
Dated: 2002-09
The anniversary of the September 11, 2001 mass murder has passed. Although moved by the occasion, I have forgone any attempt at a commemorative essay or retrospective analysis. It's been done (and done to death) by people with closer connections to the event (and others in the media who used the opportunity to move copy), and there's little of substance that I could add.
But I do want to comment on a related news item that caused quite a stir in certain circles and is destined to become one of the more interesting footnotes in this sad chapter of American history. I am referring to the winning New York lottery numbers on September 11, 2002, which were, weirdly, 9-1-1.
I must confess that when NBC's Katie Couric reported this uncanny factoid on the morning of September 12, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. How could such a thing be a mere coincidence? Being a committed skeptic, I promised myself that I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt until I had a chance to figure out the odds, but I was sure those odds would be astronomical.
Well, apparently my coffee had not kicked in yet, because later that morning on my commute I calculated the odds in about fourteen seconds. It works like this: three balls were randomly chosen, each printed with a number ranging from 0-9. The odds of any given digit appearing on each draw are 1:10. With me so far? Now, the odds of drawing any particular sequence of digits are 1:(10^n), where the exponent is the number of digits in the sequence. Thus, the odds against drawing any given three digit sequence, such as 9-1-1, are 1:(10^3) or 1:1000.
The math is simple. So simple, in fact, that I was sure I had missed something. 1:1000 is rare enough to be exceptional, but not nearly so rare as to justify the sense of profound mystery I felt when Ms. Couric interrupted my morning shave. A randomly chosen American has about the same lifetime odds of drowning or dying in a structural fire--events that are rare enough to be considered tragic and unexpected when they occur, but which never make the headlines solely on account of their improbability. Shouldn't the denominator be multiplied by 365 to reflect the unlikelihood of 9-1-1 being drawn on that particular day? What about the fact that the drawing was held in the same state that suffered the most from the terrorist attacks? Can that be plugged into the equation?
Try as I might, I could think of no good reason why those factors would be mathematically significant. Later, of course, the handicappers and statisticians came out of the woodwork to assure us that the odds are, in fact, 1:1000, and that the date and location of the drawing don't change the odds one bit, and that the whole thing was nothing more than a coincidence interesting, but not unprecedented. The Associated Press noted a similar occurrence on November 12 of last year, when the numbers 5-8-7 were drawn on the same day that Flight 587 crashed into Queens.
By the time I got to work on September 12, however, starry-eyed mystics had already deluged online discussion boards with terabytes of vague but impressive sounding speculation. New Age gurus pointed to the event as evidence of synchronicity--the concept that every coincidence that passes some arbitrary "Whoa!" threshold has deep meaning. Christians of an apocalyptic bent claimed the event demonstrated God's concern for the victims of the 9/11 tragedy. Faced with a signal to noise ratio of at least 1:1000, the job of the skeptic on September 12 was daunting, and not exactly welcome. Given the choice between an attentive and caring supernatural agency on the one hand, and cold statistical reality on the other, an incredible number of educated, otherwise rational people opted for the former.
Fine. A skeptic can calculate odds, but no amount of number crunching can conclusively disprove a metaphysical hypothesis. And so, for argument's sake, let's assume that the winning numbers in the September 11, 2002 New York lottery did indeed have cosmic significance. This leaves us with some very heavy, still-unanswered questions. For example, if the results of the drawing constituted a message from a higher power, then what exactly was that message? The numbers 9-1-1, by themselves, are not immediately suggestive of anything other than a phone number or a date on the calendar--information readily available from other sources, such as a phone book or a calendar. Aside from calendrical significance, what else could have been spelled out in the winning numbers? The potential complexity of a three-digit bitstream is very low, which restricts the amount of coded content it can carry and leaves the message open to lots of ambiguity. Why wouldn't God have chosen a higher-bandwidth medium--like cable television, for example, or a burning bush? And finally (although many more such questions could be asked), given that God chose to communicate through a lottery drawing, should fundamentalist protestant sects reconsider their opposition to gambling?
Skeptics are often accused of taking morbid pleasure in wrecking cherished popular fantasies, and as my sarcasm in the previous paragraph ought to make clear, this accusation is true to some extent. We are also accused of lacking imagination and sensitivity to those aspects of human psychology that cannot be quantified. Fair enough. But let's give human psychology a closer look for just a moment.
The human mind has a remarkable capacity for pattern recognition. In his book Why People Believe Weird Things, arch-skeptic Michael Shermer speculates very reasonably--that pattern recognition improved our evolutionary ancestors' survivability. A Homo Erectus, for example, who associated sudden loud noises with imminent danger was more likely to add his pattern recognition genes to subsequent Homo Erectus generations. Of course, not every sudden loud noise is accompanied by a charging mastodon or a falling boulder. But in an environment where false negatives may be deadly and false positives are usually costless, the evolutionary pressure on the human mind to overcompensate is unavoidable. As a result, humanity is hardwired to spot images of Jesus in burnt tortillas and messages from God in lottery drawings.
Closely associated to the human capacity for recognizing patterns is the human need for comfort in the face of uncertainty. Viewed objectively, the universe displays precisely the characteristics one would expect it to possess if it were ruled by nothing more than the laws of physics plus chance. Many Americans woke up to this grim truth for the first time on September 11, 2001, after having believed in an engaged, benevolent deity all their lives. If, one year later, a statistical quirk in a game of chance helps restore America's faith in the moral order of the universe, then perhaps, in this special case, skeptical exasperation is misplaced.
[rhinoceros]
Basically, what they say is that the odds were 1000 to 1 and that it was just about time for those numbers to come out.
Normally, even 10 to 1 odds would justify a strange feeling about such a significant event.
I have an easy explanation which makes it not only possible but inevitable, but I'll keep it to myself for a couple of days. (*evil grin*)
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rhinoceros
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Re:9-11 Lottery Number
« Reply #2 on: 2002-09-23 15:49:03 » |
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[rhinoceros]
I suspect that there are some virians who did not hold their breath while waiting for my explanation for the 9/11 lottery numbers. Anyway, here it is:
The lottery drawing was not the only event that happened on 9/11 2002 in New York City which involved numbers. I am sure these three digits regularly appear at many instances every day. The only thing requiring a favorable probability is that these numbers had to appear at an event -- any event -- worthy of the media.
By the way, here is another article on the 9/11 lottery numbers.
The Power of Coincidence
Source: Skeptic newsletter
Author: David G. Myers
Dated: September 2002
People around me have been both amused and aghast at the news that on 9-11 the New York State Lottery's evening number game popped up the numbers 9-1-1. Is this a paranormal happening? A wink from God? Is there a message here?
It's hardly the first improbable lottery event. "We print winning numbers in advance!" headlined Oregon's Columbian on July 3, 2000. State lottery officials were incredulous when the newspaper announced their 6-8-5-5 winning Pick 4 numbers for June 28 in advance. Actually, the Columbian's computers had crashed. In the scramble to re- create a news page, a copyeditor accidently included Virginia's Pick 4 numbers, which were the exact numbers that Oregon was about to draw.
We've all marveled at such coincidences in our own lives. Checking out a photocopy counter from the Hope College library desk, I confused the clerk when giving my six-digit department charge number-which just happened at that moment to be identical to the counter's six-digit number on which the last user had finished. Shortly after my daughter, Laura Myers, bought two pairs of shoes, we were astounded to discover that the two brand names on the boxes were "Laura" and "Myers."
And then there are those remarkable coincidences that, with added digging, have been embellished into really fun stories, such as the familiar Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences (both with seven letters in their last names, elected 100 years apart, assassinated on a Friday while beside their wives, one in Ford's theater, the other in a Ford Motor Co. car, and so forth). We also have enjoyed newspaper accounts of astonishing happenings, such as when twins Lorraine and Levinia Christmas, driving to deliver Christmas presents to each other near Flitcham, England, collided.
My favorite is this little known fact: In Psalm 46 of the King James Bible, published in the year that Shakespeare turned 46, the 46th word is "shake" and the 46th word from the end is "spear." (More remarkable than this coincidence is that someone should have noted this!)
What shall we make of these weird coincidences? Was James Redfield right to suppose, in The Celestine Prophecy, that we should attend closely to "strange occurrences that feel like they were meant to happen"? Is he right to suppose that "They are actually synchronistic events, and following them will start you on your path to spiritual truth"? Without wanting to rob us of our delight in these serendipities, much less of our spirituality, statisticians assure us that the coincidences tell us nothing of spiritual significance.
"In reality," says mathematician John Allen Paulos, " the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidences." When Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice, newspapers reported the odds of her feat as 1 in 17 trillion-the odds that a given person buying a single ticket for two New Jersey lotteries would win both. But statisticians Stephen Samuels and George McCabe report that, given the millions of people who buy U.S. state lottery tickets, it was "practically a sure thing" that someday, somewhere, someone would hit a state jackpot twice. Consider: An event that happens to but one in a billion people in a day happens 2000 times a year. A day when nothing weird happened would actually be the weirdest day of all.
Our intuition, as I explain in Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, fails to appreciate the streaky nature of random data. Batting slumps, hot hand shooters, and stock market patterns may behave like streak-prone random data, but our pattern-seeking minds demand explanations. Yet even the random digits of pi, which form what many mathematicians believe is a true random sequence, have some odd streaks that likely include your birth date. Mine, 9-20-42, appears beginning at the 131,564th decimal place. (To find yours, visit www.angio.net/pi/piquery.)
The moral: That a particular specified event or coincidence will occur is very unlikely. That some astonishing unspecified events will occur is certain. That is why remarkable coincidences are noted in hindsight, not predicted with foresight. And that is why even those of us who believe in God don't need God's special intervention, or psychic powers, to expect, yet also delight in, improbable happenings.
Social psychologist David G. Myers is author of Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, just published by Yale University Press. For information and excerpts, see www.davidmyers.org/intuition.
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