Saturday, August 18, 2012

The language of luck

There was a late night studio discussion of lottery millionaires on Radio 5 this week.

It is reported that cctv film exists which shows some kind man letting the latest big-time winner go ahead of him in the queue for tickets.

Those in the studio thought that this meant that, by this simple act of kindness, the Samaritan had also yielded up the winning ticket (on the assumption that both men used lucky dip rather than numbers they had selected themselves).


I do hope not.

I have not been able to find any information on the official site about how Camelot generates random selections, but the unofficial lottery.co.UK site tells us that each terminal has its own random number generating software.

So there really is no pre-allocated set of lucky dips to be distributed on a first-come-first served basis

Whew!

However – last night on Any Questions, when Shaun Ley (giving us a lucky break from Jonathan Dimbleby as chairman) turned to take a poll of the views of the live audience on one point, he was careful to stress that this was a ‘highly unscientific’ poll, just an 'extremely random selection' of people who happened to be in the audience.

Very annoying, the way words can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean.

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