Contents
1 Computing Probabilities: Right Ways and Wrong Ways
The Probabilist's Toys and Language
Independence, Airplanes, and Russian Peasants
Conditional Probability, Swedish TV, and British Courts
Car Dealers and Color Blindness
Shuttlecocks and Spaghetti Westerns
Combinatorics, Pastrami, and Poetry
The Von Trapps and The Binomial Distribution
2 Surprising Probabilities: When Intuition Struggles
Boys, Girls, Aces, and Colored Cards
3 Tiny Probabilities: Why Are They So Hard to Escape?
A Million-to-One Shot, Doc, Million to One!
Monsieur Poisson and the Mysterious Number 37
4 Backward Probabilities: The Reverend Bayes to Our Rescue
Bayes, Balls, and Boys (and Girls)
5 Beyond Probabilities: What to Expect
Good Things Come to Those Who Wait
Exponential Growth toward Extinction
Size Matters (and Length, and Age)
6 Inevitable Probabilities: Two Fascinating Mathematical Results
Get Probabilities: The Little Numbers That Rule Our Lives, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.