Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

Re:Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 y... by oso2k on Wednesday August 30, 2017 @03:21PM (#15135087)

For those who down voted me, you do not know your sample set or your test subjects. Go to the empirical data sources. Human behavior certainly affects the real probabilities. As of 2015 in the US [0], a person is more likely to be born in July, August or September. They're also more likely to be born during the middle of the work week rather than the weekends. Draw your own conclusions from the data.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_01_tables.p...

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Re:Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 y... by quesera on Thursday August 31, 2017 @01:52AM (#15138400)

Your information is interesting, but your inference is incorrect.

The Birthday Paradox has absolutely nothing to do with procreation, and everything to do with statistical probability.

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Re:Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 y... by oso2k on Thursday August 31, 2017 @01:50PM (#15142235)

Probability is just a model in lieu of the actual data with many built-in assumptions. Probability is a shortcut finding, collecting or generating data. My point is, if you have the data or a very large faction thereof, use it. Don't guess using probabilities.

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Re:Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 y... by quesera on Friday September 01, 2017 @10:44PM (#15153920)

Right, but it's really not about birthdays at all.

It's specifically about coincidences in a randomly distributed set.

It just says "birthday" in the common name because that's a relatable, if imperfect, example.

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