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From: cipher@mmm.UUCP (Andre Guirard)
Newsgroups: net.startrek
Subject: Re: Vulcan arithmetic
Message-ID: <288@mmm.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 6-Nov-85 19:34:56 EST
Article-I.D.: mmm.288
Posted: Wed Nov  6 19:34:56 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 10-Nov-85 09:54:55 EST
References: <1137@rayssd.UUCP> <298@utflis.UUCP>
Reply-To: cipher@mmm.UUCP (Andre Guirard)
Distribution: net
Organization: 3M Company, St. Paul, Minn.
Lines: 17
Keywords: seven tenths
Summary: 

In article <298@utflis.UUCP> brown@utflis.UUCP (Susan Brown) writes:
>>					... Spock computes their odds
>>of success to be some_large_number.7 to 1.  I want to know where
>>the .7 came from.
>
>Jean Lorrah (author of The Vulcan Academy Murders) has Amanda, Spock's 
>mother, suggest in one of her earlier fanzine-published stories
>that "I think they make those numbers up at least half the time."

I think the real answer is that the authors of the Star Trek scripts
don't know enough about statistics to realize that it's usually not
possible to compute the odds exactly.  In "The Trouble with Tribbles",
Spock computes the number of tribbles in the grain storage compartment
(it's some large number ending with three, I think) and then tells us
how he computed it... obviously it is not possible to compute the exact
number, but he pretends to do so.  I would think a "real" Vulcan would
have said something like, "Somewhere between 12,340,000 and 12,500,000".