Perspective on the lottery — and even bigger numbers.


Large numbers are interesting. The following quote about a hedgehog sneezing is a good example. The article at the link uses that as a starting point and goes large. Really large. Makes the brain hurt a bit to try and grasp it and doesn’t really serve any useful purpose outside of math research…but it is an interesting read if you can make it through.

Photo by Anatoly Ivanov on Unsplash

A recent Mega Millions lottery had 1-in-175,711,536 odds of winning. To put those chances in perspective, that’s about the number of seconds in six years. So it’s like knowing a hedgehog will sneeze once and only once in the next six years and putting your hard-earned money down on one particular second—say, the 36th second of 2:52am on March 19th, 2017—and only winning if the one sneeze happens exactly at that second.

From 1,000,000 to Graham’s Number — Wait But Why

From a different article about big numbers — but much easier to understand big numbers, a humorous use of Sour-Patch Kids:

And in a night fraught with moments of self-loathing, carefully placing 50 eXtreme Sour Patch Kids on top of another 50 eXtreme Sour Patch Kids, alone at 2am, was the low point. Moving on—

What does A Quadrillion Sour Patch Kids Look Like?


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