Month: August 2017

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It’s a lottery

When the UK lottery started, in, what 1994, it was a novelty. You picked 6 numbers, from 49, and bet £1. If you got 3 numbers you won £10, and the prizes went up from there. Get all 6 numbers and you won lots of millions.

We did it for a bit, a few pounds a week, because we could afford it and it was fun and we did have some winnings, the largest being just over £100 I believe. But if we didn’t do it, we didn’t much care, and if we didn’t win, which mostly we didn’t, it was not the end of the world.

I was a Maths teacher then, and there was a lot of useful material you could get out of it. What are your chances of winning? Well, of winning the jackpot, one in just less than fourteen million. It has changed now, I believe, more expensive, more numbers and smaller prizes.

People had many interesting ideas about the lottery. “Well, someone has to win and it could be me” was one. Well, of course, no-one has to win the jackpot, which is why you get rollovers.

“There’s no way to guarantee a win” was another. This is actually not true. If you bought every possible different ticket, all nearly 14 million of them, you would be guaranteed to get the jackpot, and every other minor prize several times over. The prize money would have to be over about £14m to make a profit, and goodness knows where you could find a machine to process that many tickets. Plus, if someone else chooses the winning numbers, you have to share.

“All combinations are equal, so I use my family’s birthdays”. Yes, lots of people do this, meaning numbers up to 31. Actually, if you go for higher numbers, you will still have the same chance of winning, but a reduced chance of having to share.

The best way to win is open a savings account at your bank.

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Do the right thing

President Trump, they say, is a warm, compassionate, caring man. They say. Where is the evidence for this? I have no idea. Who says it? Why, Anthony Scaramucci, who was sacked 15 days before he began his job as White House Communications Director.

President Trump, they say, likes to confound people by doing the opposite of what they expect him to do. As President of the USA, leader of the free world, we expect the President to be a statesman, we expect him to do the right thing. He therefore must be doing the wrong thing, by his own admission.

The world is not a safe place. The USA makes the world less happy than it could be. The USA is not a happy place. With protests, statues being torn down, far right white supremacists believing it is fine to kill their fellow countrymen on the street and the President refusing to clearly condemn any of it, for fear of upsetting his supporters or speaking against his beliefs, this is not good.