[maxerickson]

This is a fascinating sentence:

While the large jackpot prize may be tempting, it's extremely hard to have that one ticket in 292 million.

I think my favorite part is that extremely hard isn't a very accurate description of how unlikely it is.

[bradleyjg]

I saw a theory somewhere that human beings aren't very good at intuitively understanding even large order of magnitude differences between unlikely events. We have a mental category of "unlikely but not impossible" and slot everything from one in a thousand to one in a billion into that bucket.

[cableshaft]

I.e. the Lloyd Christmas bucket (Dumb and Dumber). "You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?" "More like one in a million." "So you're telling me there's a chance!"

[jchendy]

Poker players and literature do this all the time, much to my annoyment. "It's really hard to make a flush" ... no, it's really easy just not very likely.

[WA]

This image removed any temptation for gambling once and for all, because after all, a 1:292,201,338 chance really isn't anything one can grasp easily:

A car goes from San Diego to New Orleans and the driver throws a quarter out of his window at some point in time.

Now you drive the same route. You get the chance to stop once on this route. If your front tire comes to a halt at the exact same spot of that quarter, you hit the jackpot.

How likely does that feel?

[Wingman4l7]

Is the concept to map the distance of the route to the width of the quarter? 1 inch diameter quarter, ~1800 mile route (1.1405e+8 inches) -- off by one order of magnitude... nitpick aside, very clever visual depiction, and easy enough to explain the math. I'll have to remember this one.

[kamaal]

Very likely if 292,201,338 took the challenge.

People do win lotteries at times, don't they?

[WA]

Sure, someone will probably be stuck in a traffic jam right next to the quarter at some point, but does that help anyone to win this challenge on purpose? :)

[m-i-l]

To put it into perspective, a bookmaker in the UK offered odds of 14 million to 1 for Elvis Presley crash landing in a UFO on top of the Loch Ness monster[0].

[0] A quick Google returns a number of sources, but I'm going to use this one: http://www.elvisnews.com/news.aspx/gamblers-give-up-on-elvis...

[trevyn]

How much did he have to pay to insure those bets?