Jose writes:

Odds of winning a BIG lottery: 1:308,000,000

Wrong.

Odds of winning a BIG lottery if you purchase one ticket in your
lifetime: 1:308,000,000

Thought one ticket was 1:80,000,000; but their site says that as of
6-April it's 1:146,100,000 (and it wasn't what I said even before
that). They apparently added two more white ball numbers, so now
there are 55 white balls. 5 are drawn, so the odds of drawing any
given set of numbers should be 55-Choose-5 * 42, or 3,478,761 * 42,
or...hey, I got the same number they did! 146.1e6 ("55-Choose-5"
being my text representation of the big-C notation used in math for
combinations.)

Or is this more to the tune of "87.5% of all statistics are made up on
the spot"?

(Note that for figuring *financial* odds, you have to somehow include
the odds of multiple people holding the winning number, hence
splitting the jackpot. Especially on these mega-jackpots, that's
quite likely.)
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
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Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/