Who Farted? Some Disturbing Statistics……
Have you ever noticed that when a foul odor suddenly appears it virtually certain that someone in the “hot zone” will ask, “Who farted?”. I never quite understood understood the point of that question. Does the questioner expect an arrest warrant to be issued on the spot? Would he have you believe that his own emissions are as clean and pure as Rocky Mountain spring water?
This got me to thinking about how to compute the probability of being exposed to a methane cloud. The results are quite disturbing…..
Assume that the average person passes gas 40 times in a 24 hour period and that these eruptions are evenly distributed.
Now, let’s assume that you are a cubical rat working for some big company. You are summoned to a typical waste of time meeting in a conference room. There are 9 other people in attendance (the jerk who called the meeting, his right hand man, his secretary, and six cube dwellers including yourself). The meeting drags on for what seems like forever but is really 30 minutes of wasted time. So, what are the chances that NOBODY will fart during this meeting?
Hmmmm…. if all high school math problems were this interesting then the USA would not be scoring behind Latvia in standardized test scores.
If the average person farts 40 times per day, then there is a 2.7% chance of an eruption per minute. Said another way, there is a 97.3% chance that a single person will NOT fart in a minute. However, let 30 minutes go by and the chance drops to slightly less than an even money proposition (.973 multiplied by itself 30 times is about equal to 43%.) This means if you attend 100 such meetings that you should expect to fart at least once in 43 of them.
Now, using the same logic…. if there are 10 people in attendace then the chances of no farts being cut by anyone are miniscule ( about one in 5,000 ). Said another way, you have a better shot of getting a hummer from your wife.
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