OH man - I had a dozen once that had like 3 double yokes. I was flabbergasted as I don’t think I have ever seen that many double yokes up to that point.
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They come from immature hens, apparently. These ones are fucking massive. They take 4-5 minutes to soft boil. I love them
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According to the data I have here, it’s more common in young chickens, so that checks out!
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The ones I had didn’t seem any larger, but I did get the large sized eggs, IIRC.
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I’m sorry, I know this is really beside the point, but where are these odds coming from? There is plainly not a planet-killer asteroid hitting the earth every million years on average, and there only seem to be two or three reports of anyone ever being hit by a meteorite.
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Methinks you’ve discovered the problem, but come to an inverted conclusion…
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A very reasonable question! I keep a few weird stats like that around because “humans are bad at probability” comes up surprisingly often in conversation. I’m no fun at parties. Anyways, the cites you asked about:
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Planet Killer asteroids - scientists calculate this based on how many are in our neighborhood and how often we cross orbits with them. It is believed they happen every 50 to 60 million years, by most geological estimates, which makes us pretty overdue. That said, the next big one that we know about is not expected for another 2400 years at the soonest, but there are a lot of rocks we don’t know about, so these estimates are based on the “every 60M years” number amortized over time, and the likelihood of a rock we don’t know about being found every year (based on how many scary new rocks we find every year). We pretty regularly have close calls with big rocks that we didn’t know about, so we can kinda estimate from there how many there probably are. I tried to find a good current cite for this number, but all I have is secondary sources like this one
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Being killed by a meteorite- yes, it is exceptionally rare, which is the point of the example. Probabilities don’t just come from historical data, though. We can estimate it based on how many meteorites hit the earth, how often they hit the daylight side of the planet when people are up and about, what the density of people is out in the open, and so on. Because of the variables, the estimates range wildly from 1:3000 to 1:250000, so I picked a middle number in that range.
Note that just because something has 1:3000 odds per year, doesn’t mean 1/3000th of the population will have it happen to them every year. That’s the (ironically enough) lottery fallacy. You can flip a coin one million times and get heads every time without violating any rules of probability. Odds are never evenly distrbuted, and the shorter the span of the data, the lumpier it will be. With probabilities as small as these examples, we have very very few data points, thus the data is super lumpy. Think about trying to calculate the odds of alien life existing- the estimates vary by orders of orders of orders of magnitude because so far our n=1. For a meteorite death, our n=3 (or so), but that doesn’t make the probability estimate invalid. It just means the error bars are large.
Probabilities are very, very unintuitive, as every first-year stats student learns the hard way. 
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The same issue when I was working as a map analyst for FEMA flood plain determinations in real estate transactions. Just because it’s called a “100-year flood zone” doesn’t mean it happens every one hundred years.
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Yeah, but if something has even 1/250000 odds per year and yet only single digits of the 7.8 billion people on earth ever have it happen, I think the more likely conclusion is that the estimate is way too high than that we’ve been that lucky.
Similar for the planet-killing asteroid…especially since the idea that such impacts are periodic is largely discredited. It’s based on mass extinctions, presuming those are mostly extraterrestrial in origin, and then those turn out to be much more of a random distribution save that they can’t happen too close together. So we’re not due, and are left with the fact that they simply don’t happen as often as that.
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Well, again, that’s not really how probability works. It isn’t luck because there’s no such thing as streaks, good or bad. It’s just a small, noisy data set with big error bars. I don’t want to derail this thread with further stats talk though, so maybe we should wrap it up.
But the odds aren’t the determining factor in statistical decision making for placing a bet. Expected value is. For a $2 bet with a jackpot of $900M and odds of 1 in 302 million, the expected value is $1.49. That’s firmly in the “place that bet” zone above 1.
It’s more complicated than that, of course. You’re not getting $900M handed to you if you win. It gets spread out over 30 years or cut in half. Then there are all the payouts below the jackpot. But for just the jackpot, this isn’t actually a dumb bet, unless you shouldn’t be wasting the money when it is likely to just go poof.
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It would be if people understood the odds. That’s the problem which I keep explaining but everyone keeps dismissing. The odds are zero. I know that hurts and it doesn’t feel right, but they are. You won’t win. We are as certain of that as we can ever be about anything in the universe. You won’t win.
It’s not magic. There are (exceptionally small) non-zero odds of winning the jackpot. There is an (exceptionally large) payout. Do the math. When big numbers and small numbers collide, you do get very digestible numbers.
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This thread is the perfect example of the original point I was trying to make. People don’t understand odds this small and make all kinds of incorrect logical leaps about it. I’m bowing out now because I’ve said all I can here.
That’s not the relevant statistical function, though. It’s one thing to point out that the odds are vanishingly small(true) but to leave it at that misrepresents the situation. In this case, the potential payout overwhems the odds to actually make the expected outcome fairly rosy. Still not what anyone would call a smart investment, but not as dumb as people make out if you have a few buck to spare.
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I live in one of those 100 year flood zones and am forced to buy federal flood insurance as long as I have a mortgage.
The water has risen to biblical levels and stayed there for a couple of years 3 times in my lifetime but it’s never hit that hundred year level.
What sucks is, had I know at the time, when we rebuilt our house 30 years ago if I just went up one more block I would have been out of the flood plane and saved more than a grand a year.
When FEMA came in a few years ago to announce they were considering changing the plan so more people would have been in the flood zone, pitch forks and torches came our at the meeting. Didn’t stop them though.
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Point of view thing:
I did actually win some money on the lottery about seven or eight years ago.
I didn’t get the first number, but then I got all the rest and a bonus too.
I genuinely won a little over 2300 pounds sterling.
I was over the moon. Took ages to find a post-office who would write me a check - that’s the way it works in Dear Ol’ Blighty.
It wasn’t until last year that my younger brother said to me, and I quote: “You must be gutted.”
I was confused.
“One more number and you’d have been a millionaire”, or some such shit.
This was actually factually incorrect - I’d have needed two more.
But it did strike me - I’d been perfectly happy with that win, treated my mates and had some fun with it, but it had not once crossed my mind that I was losing out.
I guess greed has no bounds.
(sorry, waffling on again)
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Well, the FEMA information is supported by the best research the community can employ, and sometimes the results go against their wishes. Sorry about that.
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What? $4.94 million per person? I don’t think so.
Well you are the 3rd person to correct me - I mean thank you but I promise I got it.
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