Here's a blast from the past from one of my prior forums: I was debating a theist and she was claiming during a debate that actions with a probability above 10^50, something other creationists call
Borel's Law, even though it's not really a law. To illustrate this, she said that, if she had a CD and the player was in random/shuffle mode, if it still played in perfect order, the odds would be so negligibly small that one could reasonably say it would never happen. Then, I pointed out the blatant problem with that argument: just because an order seems less random doesn't mean it actually is less random. A hand of cards with the jack of diamonds, the seven of spades, the queen of clubs, the five of hearts, and the ten of diamonds has as much of a chance as a hand of the Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and ten of spades.
To further undermine her argument, I applied that to another CD: The Minutemen's Double Nickels on a Dime.
It has 42 tracks, and if it were played in a shuffle mode, assuming that it worked in such a way that there would be no repeating tracks, the odds that it would play the tracks in their proper order (assuming that such a thing was still possible) would be 1.405x10^51 to one, well within the realms of the impossible according to Borel. So, let's find
a random number scrambler, and see a new order. So, here's what I got:
3
37
22
30
10
41
2
35
1
16
39
29
36
24
33
31
15
9
21
27
8
17
38
25
26
42
28
4
14
19
5
34
11
32
18
20
6
12
7
13
23
40
What would be the odds that it hit that exact order? 1.405x10^51 to one. Exactly the same odds as the seemingly less random order.
Anyone else remember debating theists and the worst thing you could expect from them being defending an insanely unpopular war, trying to maintain a dying backlash against gay rights, or stupid shit like that?