The popular news are reporting [1,2,3,4,5] that the Multi-State Lottery Commission (MUSL) will change the rules for their lottery game Powerball, effective Jan. 15, 2012. I sent an email to the MUSL (at 8:00am Dec, 14th) asking for the new official rules, but haven't received a response yet (as of 10:30am Dec, 16th). ... [Read more...]

Once again, meaningless figures are published about a man who won the French lottery (Le Loto) for the second time. The reported probability of the event is indeed one chance out of 363 (US) trillions (i.e., billions in the metric system. or 1012)… This number is simply the square of which ... [Read more...]

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The only thing I remember from courses I had in probability a few years ago is that we also have to clearly defined the event we want to calculate the probability. On the Freakonomics blog, last week, the Israeli lottery was mentioned (here, see a... [Read more...]