Daily Archives: January 14, 2016
The Four Amigos . . .
are back together again.
Well, it was spitting rain this morning, so we didn’t walk today either. But there’s always tomorrow, right? And if you can keep a secret, a world-famous mystery writer and his wife may be accompanying us along the way.
On the PowerBall front, as I thought, the prize made it up to $1.6 Billion right before the drawing last night, and yielded three winners. And the California winner didn’t even have to buy his ticket. His boss gave it to him.
A multi-millionaire, who owns 80 assisted living facilities in California, bought 18,000 PowerBall tickets and gave them to his employees, and one of those tickets was a winner.
I guess now it’s possible that the employee might be able to buy out his boss.
Quite a few blog readers emailed me about the odds of winning the top prize, and how that works. Here’s some info I posted here in a comment, and also in several forums online.
Actually the odds of YOU having a winning number never changes, no matter how many people enter.
It’s always one in 292,201,338. This is based on the possible number combinations derived from the first five numbers 1 to 69, i.e, 11,238,513, and the Power Ball number that goes from 1 to 26.
And so 11,238,513 x 26 different Power Balls gives you 292,201,338 chances.
But two things do change as people buy more tickets as the jackpot increases.
1. The pot IS more likely to be won by someone. The more tickets, the more combinations sold, the more likely a winner.
2. And the chances of there being more than one winner also increases.
I heard yesterday that over 85% (it was 90% at the time of the drawing) of the possible number combinations, i.e. the 292.2 million, had been sold. Thus there is an ~85% chance that someone will win. But for an individual, it’s still one in 292.2 million.
Statistics are funny things and often run against ‘common sense’. For example, if you flip a coin, and it comes up heads 10 times in a row, it is no more or no less likely to come up heads again, i.e. a 50% chance.
Our good friends, Nick and Terry Russell, showed up here at Colorado River about 1:30 and were soon parked and set up. Nick called me when they were coming through Schulenburg and I drove around to scout out a good site for them, and as it turned out, I found a nice 50am FHU site just 6 spaces away from us.
We spent a couple of hours just talking and catching up before we all headed out to have dinner down in Columbus at Los Cabos Mexican Restaurant, a place we all really like.
Along the way, we found that diesel at the Colorado County Co-op had dropped another 5 cents a gallon, to $1.75. This past Sunday, it was $1.85, and then yesterday, it was $1.80. Ten cents in 5 days is a big drop.
As with previous visits, everything was delicious, but I’m not sure if we would have noticed if it wasn’t. We were talking, laughing, and chatting so much. And eating, of course. But I think that did come in fourth.
Coming back to the park, we made a stop at the hardware store in downtown Columbus, and then Brookshire Bros. for some supplies, before getting back home a little after 6pm.
Not sure what’s on tap for tomorrow. Nick and Terry have been on the road with some 400+ miles days recently so they may just want to jell.
We’ll see.
Thought for the Day:
Politics: from the Greek “poly” [many] and the English “ticks”.
So ‘Many Blood Sucking Ticks’.
Sounds about right to me.
ghdghdfg
