Just recently my mom decided that we should sit down and have the Talk. Again. Except now it's morphed from the idealistic future husband talk to an in depth discussion about numbers. I pointed out that while I agree with her in that I don't want to just "settle" for anyone, the concept of an ideal partner means that a certain number of very specific traits all have to occur in one individual. Since each of these traits is one possibility from a set of possible traits, the presence of each trait can be counted as one event. And since "settling" is not what anyone's interested in, we have to use the "and" logic instead of the "or" logic, which means we're multiplying the probability of the occurrence of EACH event and not adding them. Therefore the odds are stacked against the existence of one individual who possesses all of the desired traits. However, when take into account the size of the human population on this planet, and multiply that into the occurrence of the said individual, it is statistically possible for that person to exist somewhere on earth. Heck, depending on how picky we are about the person and how many traits we're trying to match, there might even be more than one person existing on the planet who would match. However, when taken into account the number of people an average person meets during his / her life time, again, the odds are stacked against the chance meeting of that one individual.
I probably would have a better chance of winning the lottery by buying one ticket a year than meeting the Right Guy one of these years, I told my mom.
She took me out to buy lottery tickets. (Such is the state of a mother's heart.)
We each got one. The number on mine is: 070816414523. I was vaguely disappointed that I didn't get to pick the numbers myself but oh well, there's always next year.
Along the way we saw the Christmas trees that the other people had dragged out, that the wind had blown into the middle of the street (still happening right now, the wind just HOWLED). Our street is currently suffering from a plethora of run-away trees. Someone should paste a "SLOW; TREES CROSSING" sign up for the trees and drivers' safety.
2 comments:
Ohhh dear God my mom has been talking to me about boys too! Except our discussions (not really discussions, more like lectures) have not gone into the subject of statistics. Now that is just weird! :P
Also, I have never been able to keep track of all those kittens! You'll have to post some pictures of them sometime.
Oh this is all so you and I love it xD
I think the trick is to raise your odds by figuring out which places the "right" person is likely to be met.
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