He could get them from the horse's mouth if he wanted. He and Javert got along pretty well, even if the man wore a suit like metal fans wore black. Second skin. Nobody'd worn a suit like that in decades. Even corporate drones looked vaguely apologetic about the things.
"Not a fucking thing. Poor bastard." S.T. hadn't heard of anyone being taken twice before. Not that it should have been a surprise. Anyone who'd passed middle school math and wasn't sitting in front of a slot machine knew that it wasn't unlikely. If Landel was picking names out of a hat.
There was a cute party trick S.T. had done a few times as a combination ice-breaker and statistics lesson. It took a room of about thirty people to have a decent chance of working. Fifty and it was almost too easy. All it took was a group of people who didn't know each other well enough to have each other's birthdays in their Rolodexes. S.T. would pull out a crisp five dollar bill and see who'd bet against him that there weren't two people in the room with the same birthday.
The trick worked because people were egotists. Birthdays were supposed to be unique. Never mind that there were only three hundred and sixty five days in the year, and each was equally likely to spit out babies. (This was the part in the explanation where some nerd in the back row stuck his hand up, and then when S.T. ignored him, started bitching about leap years or the baby boom after the Blizzard of '78 or June weddings until the entire room shushed him.) People thought about the odds that someone else had their birthday, which in a small crowd wasn't that likely. Say it was thirty people. That gave 30 * (1/365) chances. Call it one in twelve, keep the change. Easy to bet against.
The problem was that they'd skipped all the other people's odds. Actually doing the math out would turn him into a social pariah, but he could start walking around the room, pointing out that Roger and Rachel had one chance, and then Roger and Mick, and Kenny and John, and before long he had everyone nodding. Then the big reveal, and ten bucks in his pocket.
Sometimes people even learned something. It was a dangerous gamble, not because of the probabilities, but because he couldn't help wondering when some flack was going to figure it out, too. They were collectively a bunch of crap-flinging monkeys, but they'd learned what stuck. Clever metaphors for mathematical concepts were high on the list. Boxcars and banana peel bullshit. Two dozen cases of rare brain cancers weren't a statistical likelihood, they were a fucking smoking gun. Especially when the statistics were being dredged up by the people who'd been pouring vinylidene chloride in the local swimming hole.
"Think I'll take you up on those notes." He shrugged. "Whenever." He was still trying not to decide if it would be better or worse the second time. Getting dragged up here. "I could use the short version now, though."
no subject
"Not a fucking thing. Poor bastard." S.T. hadn't heard of anyone being taken twice before. Not that it should have been a surprise. Anyone who'd passed middle school math and wasn't sitting in front of a slot machine knew that it wasn't unlikely. If Landel was picking names out of a hat.
There was a cute party trick S.T. had done a few times as a combination ice-breaker and statistics lesson. It took a room of about thirty people to have a decent chance of working. Fifty and it was almost too easy. All it took was a group of people who didn't know each other well enough to have each other's birthdays in their Rolodexes. S.T. would pull out a crisp five dollar bill and see who'd bet against him that there weren't two people in the room with the same birthday.
The trick worked because people were egotists. Birthdays were supposed to be unique. Never mind that there were only three hundred and sixty five days in the year, and each was equally likely to spit out babies. (This was the part in the explanation where some nerd in the back row stuck his hand up, and then when S.T. ignored him, started bitching about leap years or the baby boom after the Blizzard of '78 or June weddings until the entire room shushed him.) People thought about the odds that someone else had their birthday, which in a small crowd wasn't that likely. Say it was thirty people. That gave 30 * (1/365) chances. Call it one in twelve, keep the change. Easy to bet against.
The problem was that they'd skipped all the other people's odds. Actually doing the math out would turn him into a social pariah, but he could start walking around the room, pointing out that Roger and Rachel had one chance, and then Roger and Mick, and Kenny and John, and before long he had everyone nodding. Then the big reveal, and ten bucks in his pocket.
Sometimes people even learned something. It was a dangerous gamble, not because of the probabilities, but because he couldn't help wondering when some flack was going to figure it out, too. They were collectively a bunch of crap-flinging monkeys, but they'd learned what stuck. Clever metaphors for mathematical concepts were high on the list. Boxcars and banana peel bullshit. Two dozen cases of rare brain cancers weren't a statistical likelihood, they were a fucking smoking gun. Especially when the statistics were being dredged up by the people who'd been pouring vinylidene chloride in the local swimming hole.
"Think I'll take you up on those notes." He shrugged. "Whenever." He was still trying not to decide if it would be better or worse the second time. Getting dragged up here. "I could use the short version now, though."