Skip to main content

How to Launder Money

This is a great article on "everyday" statistics.  You have to read through nearly to the end to get to the "math" around money laundering: $0.53 on the $1.00 is the basic return ratio, according to this article, which is not too bad a return, all things considered.  More interesting are the statistical anomalies around multiple winners.  I always try to think of the low tech angle, and it strikes me that there may be a simpler way to increase your return:  simply buy known winning tickets (ones that are already scratched) from people at a premium that is better than the $0.53.   Seems too obvious....but I wonder if the FBI has checked Craigslist for ads offering to "buy winning lottery tickets at more than face value".

http://www.lotterypost.com/news/227079/1940460

I have to do some searching for why this "single instance" algorithm works; it is not immediately obvious.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fourth R.

Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and algoRithms.  My wife and I were just brainstorming about this: how coding should be the next "basic" skill.  Of course, someone was ahead of us and posted this .  It is awesome to see Mozilla Hackasaurus referenced in this article.  It is a small world. In the early days of the printing press, scholars wrote the books; the press was simply used for production (see this article ).  As time went on, "average" people became familiar with the medium, and used it for their own messages.  We are at just that point with the Web.  Software Engineers write the code, and the Web distributes it.   Software Engineers are the algoRithm scholars of today.  They won't be for long.  Soon algoRithms will be taught starting in elementary school, along with the other three R's.
Read more

Connectome as a Book

Your Connectome is a map of your brain.  Every neuron, every synapse. I am only a few pages into Connectome, but was intrigued by a sentence: "Human DNA....has three billion letters....would be a million pages long if printed as a book."  The companion question, "How many pages for the Connectome?" might be answered later in the book, but I thought I would take a shot at it here. Here is the punchline: Your Connectome book is 6.7 million times longer than your DNA book. That human DNA is about a million pages is not too surprising, although it probably is not optimized. According to quora there are between 1500 and 1800 letters per page.  I am going to use round numbers, namely 2000.  Then, the 3x10^9 DNA letters would actually be 1.5 million pages.  But this is very wasteful.  Even using just ASCII we can encode four DNA letters per character, so the book should really only be about 400K pages.  And, this book is much more interesting; in...
Post a Comment
Read more