Topic
Probability
3 articles
Society
Why does the other queue always move faster?
Everybody believes it and everybody assumes it is a complaint rather than a fact. Two researchers measured the same effect on a highway and found that it is genuinely true, for a reason that has nothing to do with luck.
Mathematics
Why has no shuffled deck ever come up twice?
People have been shuffling playing cards for more than six hundred years, in millions of homes, on billions of evenings. Give a deck a proper shuffle tonight and the order in your hands has almost certainly never existed before.
Mathematics
Why do two people in your class probably share a birthday?
Thirty children, three hundred and sixty-five days, and no obvious way for two of them to collide. Yet in a class that size a shared birthday turns up about seven times in ten.