Poisson Distribution: Flush fish?
By Philip Dace, John Bream and Malcolm Guppy
Address withheld.
Introduction
Lady Luck, it seems, has a lot to answer for. Not only does she ensure that my football team continually ruin their promising first half display, but she also continues to wreck my weekend by making sure that not even a single one of my lottery numbers comes up… But all may not be lost. Here we report, for the first time, the use of fish to predict lottery numbers, thus cheating Lady Luck, stealing victory from right under her beautiful nose, and winning millions.
Everyone has their own particular way of picking lottery ticket numbers. Perhaps you use a favourite number, a birthday, a memorable date, maybe you even use a shiny pin or a lucky dip. Not known for their skill when it comes to counting (Gadagkar 1995), learning or memory - in fact, a memory of several seconds at best is described by Hughes & Blight (1999), the humble goldfish has been unfortunately overlooked as a predictive tool in the past, until now.
Methods
During a visit to a pet shop, we observed goldfish (Carassius auratus). Goldfish are ideal for research of this kind, because they are gold and have inbuilt scales, removing the need to weigh them before experimenting. They looked nice, and so we chose six at random. All goldfish were kept in gla
Lady Luck, it seems, has a lot to answer for. Not only does she ensure that my football team continually ruin their promising first half display, but she also continues to wreck my weekend by making sure that not even a single one of my lottery numbers comes up… But all may not be lost. Here we report, for the first time, the use of fish to predict lottery numbers, thus cheating Lady Luck, stealing victory from right under her beautiful nose, and winning millions.
Everyone has their own particular way of picking lottery ticket numbers. Perhaps you use a favourite number, a birthday, a memorable date, maybe you even use a shiny pin or a lucky dip. Not known for their skill when it comes to counting (Gadagkar 1995), learning or memory - in fact, a memory of several seconds at best is described by Hughes & Blight (1999), the humble goldfish has been unfortunately overlooked as a predictive tool in the past, until now.
Methods
During a visit to a pet shop, we observed goldfish (Carassius auratus). Goldfish are ideal for research of this kind, because they are gold and have inbuilt scales, removing the need to weigh them before experimenting. They looked nice, and so we chose six at random. All goldfish were kept in gla