“Another lottery mystery that raised many eyebrows occurred in Germany on June 21, 1995. The freak event happened in a lottery called Lotto 6/49, which means that the winning six numbers are drawn from 1 to 49. On the day in question the winning numbers were 15-25-27-30-42-48. The very same sequence had been drawn previously, on December 20, 1986. It was the first time in 3,016 drawings that a winning sequence had been repeated. What were the chances of that? Not as bad as you'd think. When you do the math, the chance of a repeat at some point over the years comes out to around 28 percent.”
“The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that pa...”
Leonard Mlodinow
“The outline of our lives, like the candles flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate.”
Leonard Mlodinow
“Random events often come like the raisins in a box of cereal - in groups, streaks, and clusters. And although Fortune is fair in potentialities, she is not fair in outcomes.”
Leonard Mlodinow
“The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense.”
Leonard Mlodinow
“The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our view of the world by distorting our perception of past events and our environment.”
Leonard Mlodinow