On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:58:05 -0400, Goedjn wrote:

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:07:56 GMT, Greg Guarino
wrote:

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:52:18 -0700, "Steve B"
wrote:


"Greg Guarino" wrote

What amazes me is when I hear that someone has actually drilled or cut
through a heat or water pipe.

Greg Guarino


A friend of mine went postal after some personal problems. He fired off
three shots inside his house. He hit one hot water copper pipe, one cold
water copper pipe, and a run of Romex.

What are the chances of that?

Steve

By the standard formulas of probability I suppose you'd have to divide
the surface area with sensitive stuff behind it by the total surface
area of the walls, floors and ceilings of your house, yielding a
pretty small probability for each shot.

But that neglects the properties of Murphy's law, which suggests that
the chance is much higher. I'd like to add to the many corollaries of
that law one of my own:

"The chance of something bad happening is proportional to the square
of the stupidity of your action. "

Twice as stupid = FOUR times as likely. Three times as stupid? NINE
times as likely. Ten times as stupid can make even the most improbable
outcome a near certainty. Firing off a gun in your own house has to be
in that category.



Well, the odds of hitting anything are pretty low,
but if you put three shots in roughly the same place,
and that place happens to be a convenient spot to run
'stuff' up and down the wall, then the odds of hitting
more than one thing aren't much worse than the odds of
hitting the first thing.

And "improbable" is never equivalent to any kind of "impossible".
Improbable things do happen.
--
102 days until the winter solstice celebration

Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.laughingsquid.com

"How could you ask be to believe in God when there's
absolutely no evidence that I can see?" -- Jodie Foster