What Are The Odds?

"Not sure of the math, but I am sure of the general assumption that the odds are more than coincidence.

INTERESTING.

The odds of winning the Florida lottery are:                 1 in 22,957,480

The odds of winning the Powerball lottery are:             1 in 175,223,510

The odds of winning the Mega Millions lottery are:      1 in 258,890,850

The odds of a hard disk failing in any given month is: 1 in 36

 The Simple Minded Reasoning: 

Disk drives that are left running continuously, last about three years. Three years is 36 months. Therefore, the odds of a disk failing in any given month is about 1 in 36.

This is a very simplified model since disk failure modes are more often at end-of-service-life rather than linearly spread over the median lifetime. But, even if this assumption is incorrect by a factor of 4 times, the calculation still results in huge numbers.

 The odds of two different drives failing in the same month are roughly 1 in 36 squared, or:  1 in 1,296

 The odds of three drives failing in the same month is 36 cubed or: 1 in 46,656

 The odds of seven different drives failing in the same month (the claim made by the IRS when they received a letter asking about emails targeting conservative and pro-Israeli groups) is 36 to the 7th power:  1 in 78,364,164,096  (over 78 Billion).

 That means, the odds are greater you will win the Florida Lottery 3413 times, than the odds of having seven IRS hard drives crash in the same month.

 Boy, these guys are really unlucky.  If the odds were any greater you might almost be tempted to think that the administration was lying to us!

 When asked about this, President Obama said: “Not even mass corruption... not even a smidgen of corruption.” at the IRS, etc."

[tip o' the hat to correspondent Stan]