Month: May 2014

  • Survivorship Bias

    There’s a probably apocryphal story of a man who wrote to a number of wealthy people telling him that if they paid him a dollar he would accurately predict the winner of an upcoming NFL game. If he was wrong, he would refund their money. He got over a hundred takers and he sent half…

  • 50 Percent Chance of Death by Blackhole

    Sometime ago, the Jon Oliver for the Daily Show did an interview with a man who was protesting the creation of a particle accelerator. He argued this new accelerator was going to create a black hole that would destroy our entire planet. This shocking conclusion surprised most, so the interviewer asked the man: “What are the…