On a whim the other day, I bought a paperback called "Improbable". Of course, if you read this blog at all and happen to be aware that I enjoy reading quite a bit, you would understand that it wasn’t very improbable that I would buy it, even though I wasn’t looking for a new book.

When I opened the page after the dedication but before the book, I immediately knew I picked the right book. Here is what I read:

"Okay, let’s talk about probability. First up, everybody’s favorite topic: the lottery.

The odds of winning Powerball are approximately 120 million to 1. Since its inception in 1997, over 50 people have "defied the odds" and won the jackpot, making them some of the luckiest, and wealthiest, people on the planet. I hate those people. But I digress.

Now let’s talk about another low-probability event: civilization getting wiped out by a giant asteroid colliding with the earth. Astrophysicists have calculated that the chance of this happening in any given year is approximately 1 million to 1.

Since our simian ancestors have roamed the planet for over 7 million years, the probability that an asteroid would have wiped us all out by now is roughly 700 percent. In other words, we should all be dead – not once, not twice, but seven times over.

However, as most of you already know, since the recorded history of mankind, humanity has never been annihilated.

So what’s my point? Well, it’s not that we’re all going to be killed by an asteroid. Instead I want you understand something about low-probability events, and that is this:

Shit happens."

The "quote" is attributed to David T. Caine, the (I believe) fictional protagonist of the book. I am only on page 54, but so far so good. (It has another character named Tversky…).