The net is all abuzz with Arnie’s F-bomb veto message, which his office called a “weird coincidence.” How much of a coincidence? If we say that every letter has a 1/26 chance of occurring, then the chance of seven specific letters beginning the seven lines in question, the probability is one chance in 26^7 = 8,031,810,176.
But how can I stand out from the crowd that way? we know that letters are not equally likely. Note that E, T and A, considered the most frequent letters in English prose, are not in the F-bomb. We can argue about relative frequencies, and which block of prose to use to calculate them, but the obvious answer is to take the entire message itself, and use the frequencies we find there. And the answer is …
probability = 3.64933e-12, or 1 chance in 274023114795 (See the Python code.)
That’s one chance in 274 billion. And since the legislature probably has passed 274 billion veto-worthy bills this year, we can conclude that yeah, it must be coincidence.
Note that I have ignored the conveniently informal “kicks the can down the alley” in an official correspondence, and the convenient but awkward “overwhelmingly deserve”, and the convenient paragraph breaks. And the different distribution of first letters versus other letters in a word. Figuring all that out is too much like work.
But if I lived in California, and he wasn’t a Republican, and he wasn’t, uh, screwing with my favorite CA city by doing this, then yeah, it would be worth a vote next election.
