[WSJ] Sen. John McCain died Aug. 25 of a brain tumor, a glioblastoma. Sen. Ted Kennedy died of the same disease, also on Aug. 25, nine years earlier.
That’s quite a coincidence. But in a world as wide as this one, extremely unlikely things happen every day. Last spring a friend of mine had a straight flush in a hand of five-card draw poker. There are 2,598,960 possible hands in five-card draw, only 36 of which beat the lowest straight flush. So the odds of losing while holding a straight flush are about 1 in 72,000. He lost anyway.
History provides endless examples of odds even longer than that: |