Re:Howland Will Forgery Trial
by PopePompus on Saturday August 01, 2020 @10:34PM
(#24025861)
Outrageous bullshit like this appears in modern court cases all the time today. For example, it is common to cite astronomically small odds that a DNA match is in error, completely ignoring the far higher odds that the sample was accidentally contaminated, or the lab deliberately falsified the result to satisfy prosecutors, etc. I'm not saying that DNA evidence is bullshit, only that the only way to get something like a 10^-21 odds of error is to ignore all the largest possible error sources.
> the probability that all 30 downstrokes should coincide in two genuine signatures was 1 2.666 × 10 21 {\displaystyle \textstyle {\frac {1}{2.666\times 10^{21}}}} \textstyle\frac{1}{2.666 \times 10^{21}}. That is one in 2,666,000,000,000,000,000,000, in the order of magnitude of sextillions.
is such outrageous bullshit that I'm saddened he wasn't immediately laughed out of court.