19March
Hmm, it appears that Haloscan is now relying on a Javascript unescape trick to allow posting. Some of us don't allow Javascript to run without a damned good reason, and playing nice for an exceptionally flaky comment service is not a good reason.
So, one for the Bother's Bar commentariat: we worked out the probability of opening with five in a row last year, while researching a completely different matter. The chance of five in a row works out at roughly one in 1500, so to see it in game 411 is not eyebrow-raisingly inconsistent with probability - it's roughly a 3-1 shot to have seen the phenomenon by now. Odds of a seven-in-a-row: roughly one in 100,000; we would not expect to see that again before the series ends. And odds of eliminating all ten blues in 12 boxes (as happened in the previous game) is one-in-5350.
That two events of such high improbability have turned up in successive games must raise questions. We trust the auditors, but recent evidence (see: the apparent cancellation of Brainteaser
) has shown that we cannot trust Endemol in general, and Endemol Bristol in particular.
