Now you're throwing in a whole new level of sophistry to the argument, Mr. Hollins:
So what if 10,000 years is small "on a celestial time frame"? Civilization as we know it hasn't even been around that long, let alone a human lifetime. Please, stop with the verbiage and show your arithmetic! On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Alexander Hollins < [email protected]> wrote: > TECHNICALLY, if the statement is the odds of such a thing happening on the > same day, then the odds are one in 4.34 million. (the number of days you > calculated). That said, one in a million odds, when talking about things > on a celestial time frame, broken up by days, are pretty damn good odds. > > On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 1:36 AM, George Paulson < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> 271.8*16,000 comes out to 4,348,800 days. 4,348,800/365 comes out to >> 11,915 years. >> >> So like I said we can expect an event like this roughly every 10,000 >> years or so. >> >> That's a far cry from the one in one billion odds or the one in one >> million odds after discounting by a factor of a thousand, isn't it? >> >> >> ------------------------------ >> Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 01:04:34 -0600 >> Subject: Re: [Vo]:Russian meteor coincidence odds >> From: [email protected] >> To: [email protected] >> >> >> You quote me incorrectly. My actual words were "less than one in a >> million". I stated so because mine was a "naive calculation" that came up >> with 1/1332250000 to which I then applied a "discount by a factor of a >> thousand" precisely to address such arguments as yours. >> >> To normalize your calculation properly you have to multiply 271.8*16,000. >> >> Now, can you do that arithmetic for us to complete your "critique"? >> >> >> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 11:13 PM, George Paulson < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> >> In an earlier message, James Bowery claimed that the odds of the Russian >> meteor and asteroid DA14 passing Earth on the same day were "one in a >> billion": >> >> http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg76844.html >> >> "The odds of this coincidence are literally far less than one in a >> million. The naive calculation is based on two like celestial events that >> independently occur once in a hundred years occurring on the same day: >> >> 1/(365*100)^2 >> = 1/1332250000 >> >> Note: that is one in a billion. Discount by a factor of a thousand for >> whatever your argument is and you are still one in a million. >> >> This is not a coincidence." >> >> This is incorrect. It is more like the birthday problem, where we're looking >> for the number of "years" that pass until two wandering asteroids have the >> same "birthday". A birthday here is when they fly by the Earth. >> >> >> We can expect the fly by of a DA14 type object every 40 years. If we >> also assume that something like the Russian meteor passes by every 40 years, >> this gives us a 16,000 day "year", and with a Taylor expansion you get a >> >> >> 99% probability of there being a coincident "birthday" after 271.8 "years", >> or roughly 10,000 of our years. >> >> So we can expect an event like this once every 10,000 years. >> >> >> >
