The argument has usually been over the desirability or undesirability of a) buying lottery tickets, and b) what numbers to pick once the lottery ticket is bought.

First, the bad news about lottery tickets: the probability of winning the Lotto 6/49 jackpot is approximately one in 14 million. That's one in 14,000,000, for those who prefer lots of zeroes. Which I do, but only on cheques--and a cheque with that many zeroes on it is precisely what you are most unlikely to win buying a lottery ticket. Lotteries are nothing but a tax that people pay voluntarily to the government to help fund things that the same people scream about their taxes being used to pay for--things like the arts. And the reason people buy them is because they don't really understand just how little chance they have of winning.

But that's not all. Nobody would be foolish enough to choose, say, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 as the numbers they're going to play. "What are the odds of that combination coming up?" they'd say. "They must be astronomical!"

Well, yes, they are. About 14 million to one. Exactly the same as any other combination of numbers coming up, and that includes your carefully guarded series of numbers based on your age, your birthday, your address and how old you were when you lost your virginity. The odds of any particular series of six numbers being drawn in Lotto 6/49--any series at all--are 14 million to one.

It's magical thinking. People think a particular series of numbers are lucky or unlucky,when in fact, they're just numbers. That's why the half-dozen times I've bought lottery tickets, I've always let the machine do the number-picking for me. After all, a machine is going to generate the winning numbers, why shouldn't a machine pick them?

But it's an uphill battle, convincing people of these things. Try to convince someone that a flipped coin is just as likely to come up heads after it's already come up heads nine times in a row. Go on, try. "The odds must be astronomical!" they'll say, but in this case, they're wrong. It doesn't matter if you've flipped the coin five times or 500 times and gotten heads every time, the sixth time or 501st time you flip it (assuming it hasn't been doctored) the probability it will come up heads is still 1/2.

It's true that the probability of flipping 10 heads in a row is only 1/1024--but that doesn't matter. Every time you flip the coin again, the slate is wiped clean, and the probability of that particular coin toss coming up heads is 1/2.

This is one of those areas where "common sense" leads people astray, and when they're led astray in a casino, they're liable to believe all sorts of impossible things and come out a whole lot poorer than when they went on, leaving the casino and, in this province, the government, laughing all the way to the bank.

All I can do is fight my lonely fight, argue my lonely argument--and write my lonely text panels (because everyone in the science centre movement knows that "nobody reads text panels"--for the new exhibits on probability at the Saskatchewan Science Centre.

10:11 PM

I've decided the true indication that one is a grown-up is when one's appreciation of fresh snowfall changes. When you're a kid, every snowfall is a delight, because it means tobagganing and snow angels and snowball fights (yeah, sure, and wet socks and wet mittens and sniffles, but they're a small price to pay). When you're an adult, every snowfall is a potential fender-bender, a nuisance that must be shoveled (making it also a potential heart attack) and one more reason why you won't be golfing any time soon.

Of course, by that measure, I'm still a kid in early winter, when I delight in the fresh snow, and a really small child at Christmas, when I practically demand it; and a grown-up from about February on, when a kind of grim resignation takes hold. And when it comes to April 1 snowfalls--well, then, April Fool's joke or not, I become an ancient curmudgeon given to muttering curses under my breath and shaking my fist at nothing in particular.