"Um, he's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Brownian pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious."
I'm sick. But you probably already figured that out.
Last week, I also happened to be suffering from some sort of head cold. The effects still linger in phlegm form combined with a bad cough and great quantities of perspiration (though for me that’s nothing new). You'd think all of this would be enough to make me quit smoking and go for a jog around the block, but it's exactly that that kind of erroneous thinking that caused you to fail Comp. Lit. three times over.
I'm much stronger than that.
Anyway, I was sick enough to justify taking a couple of days off from work. I could've gotten away with ditching Friday too under the "Try not to infect the immuno-compromised cancer patients with your outside diseases like the 'flu and Chlamydia, for starters" clause of our Policies & Procedures Manual (I swear it's there, right under the "If your supervisor's on vacation and you don't have a meeting, you can dress as if it's casual Friday" clause and before the "Go ahead and take a box of surgical gloves; you probably have a medical need for them at home" clause) but I wanted to rack up a few martyr points.
The other day I was relating this story to a friend who was moved to exclaim, "Brownian, you're such an interesting fellow, I wonder how a polymath such as yourself spends his free time. Please elucidate for me what you did during your convalescence."
Well, for some odd reason, I'm strangely energetic when I've got a cold. Thus, over the course of the two days, I washed all the dishes, tidied up (and subsequently dirtied) the living room, chopped up a bunch of vegetables for healthy snacking, organised my home office (well, partially; I unearthed the shoebox full of unpaid bills), done the laundry (I now smell slightly fresher than a damp Stephen Harper's hairpiece), and began the process of sorting through all my mp3s for transfer to my iPod (nothing drowns out the voices in my head during the bike ride to work better than Platinum Blonde). Of course, now that I'm ostensibly well, I'm back to lying on the couch watching marathon showings of The Office while popping lukewarm chicken 'bitlets' from Safeway.
What really sets me off as a man of questionable mental stability is that, while taking actual, justified sick time off from my job as a statistician, I calculated statistics!
Let me explain. It all started with this entry by fellow Humpday blogger Spoonman. In it, in case you're too damn lazy to read it for yourself, he predicts a score of 9 to 7—in one game—for a World Cup soccer pool. (Apparently this was back in the 90s; before reason was invented.) The joke is, of course, that soccer game scores never get that high and how silly and let's all have a belly laugh.
I'd heard the story before, but this time it set the ol' noggin a-noodlin'. Initially I wondered what kind of pool one could have on game scores when neither team is likely to score more than three goals apiece. Assuming a place for each combination of zero through three goals per team, that leaves a total of sixteen (4×4) total bets per game. That would do of course for a small office or group of friends, but what to do for real bettors? Well, I rarely gamble (except on whether or not anyone's still reading at this point) so who cares? On to a more interesting question:
Just how often are goals scored in professional soccer, and what is the likelihood of a game ending in a score of 9 to 7?
Ah, to someone like me, a question like this is better than porn (when I'm already spent, that is.) Goals scored in a game, like other discrete event functions, roughly follow a Poisson distribution. Knowing this, if one knows the mean (average) number of events per period (goals per game), one can estimate the likelihood that a given number of goals per game will be scored. To determine the mean, I went to the first official-looking FIFA World Cup site I googled: FIFAworldcup.com: The official site of FIFA World Cup. From this I determined the average number of goals scored per team per game in the 2006 FIFA World Cup: about 1.125.
Using a simplified formula,
where n is the number of goals per team per game,
Further, since we now know that the likelihood of a team scoring seven goals within one game is 1.47×10-2% and that of a team scoring nine goals is 2.58×10-4% we merely multiply them together to get 3.79×10-8% or 1 in 2.5 trillion.
Keep in mind that I'm making a number of assumptions here: that the number of goals scored by each team in one game are independent, that the 2006 FIFA World Cup scores are representative of World Cup scores in general, you're still reading (as noted above), etc.
So, what can we conclude from all of this?
- Spoonman has no future betting on soccer scores;
- Statistics can teach you lots about the world;
- I should never be allowed to reproduce for all our sakes; and
- I would be a far more effective employee if they just sent me home with a smallpox-infected blanket and paid for my high-speed internet.
I've got to head home now: I feel a headache coming on and I've been wondering just how out of the ordinary this latest heat wave is.
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