View from the North 40: What are the odds?

Winning the big payout in any lottery is rare because the odds are astronomically against that happening, but that holds true for a lot of things.

Because the lottery folks are in the business of making money, they take paying it out very seriously. In the U.K., people who play the British National Lottery have about a 1-in-45 million chance of winning the scratch ticket’s big payout, which is significantly better than the 1-in-292.2 million odds of winning the U.S. Powerball.

People who are much smarter than I am at math can calculate different odds pretty quickly, but I do know enough to say that some things worsen your odds for winning, like increasing the number of lottery numbers that have to be matched. That’s why it’s easier to get a pair than to get a royal flush or a Yahtzee.

A recent winning ticket purchased by two U.K. friends would seem to have the standard 1-in-45 Million chance of winning $5.2 million, The Sun newspaper says, however authorities are withholding the payout and investigating the dynamic duo, Mark Goodram and Jon-Ross Watson. The pair are well-known petty criminals in the town of Bolton where they have both appeared in the town’s “most wanted” list.

Goodram and Watson are under suspicion for somehow bettering their odds of winning. Even if authorities find out the pair cheated, figuring their odds of winning is pretty straightforward.

What then are the odds of random things happening? Like, what are the odds of a beehive falling onto your head?

The Associated Press reported this week that a woman in Tempe, Arizona, was picking up her child from daycare when high winds caused a beehive to fall from a tree, striking the woman in the noggin.

Here are the variables that affect the odds: The bees had to pick that spot on that tree. The wind had to be blowing that speed and that direction. And that woman had to be walking there at the very moment in time that the hive and her head were trying to occupy the exact same location in space.

It’s like a miracle, only, y’know, really bad.

Consider, then, the predicament pilot John Gregory found himself April 22 when his single-engine Piper Cub PA-18 lost power in the air near the resort town of McCall, Idaho. In his attempt to reach an open field for a spontaneously scheduled crash landing, Gregory’s airplane lost too much altitude, struck the top of a giant white fir tree and got stuck there — tangled in the piny boughs, nose down, 60 feet off the ground.

McCall volunteer firefighters responded to the scene and found Gregory uninjured in the plane, which was intact except for one wheel and part of a propeller on the ground. The plane was in a fir tree that was perfectly sound and strong enough to hold an entire airplane perfectly balanced in its branches. What are the odds?

What are the odds of that happening, really? I mean, that tree, that spot, that securely balanced position? What if the wheel had stayed on — could that have tipped the balance enough for the plane to topple out of the tree at the most inconvenient moment?

It gets more outlandish than that. Yes, it does.

Volunteer firefighter Randy Acker was there, and he owns a tree removal company so he used his equipment to scale the tree, tie the plane into place, harness Gregory and help him to the ground.

What if Acker wasn’t there? What if the best they had was a firefighter who owned a furniture store, and they were all, like, “Hold on there, Mr. Gregory. We’ll be back in an hour with a stack of Posturepedics for you to land on when you bail outta the plane. Everything will be A-OK.”

What if the best they had was me as a volunteer firefighter? I’d be telling the pilot, “You hang in there, dude. I’ll be back with a horse. You’ll just hafta jump and land astraddle of the horse. I’ve seen it done in a hundred western movies. You’ll be fine. I even got a tall horse so you won’t have as far to go in the free-fall portion of this epic plan.”

What are the odds of that working out?

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I’ll bet Wile E. Coyote could calculate those odds at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.