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As a kid in the 80s I wrote a program in Basic to randomly pick lottery numbers and print them as fast as it could and stop when it matched a predefined number.

Watching the program spin for hours disabused me of any notion that the lottery could be won. It was a good way to get a feel for the ridiculous odds involved and to this day I've never felt tempted to play the lottery.

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I also like comparisons to the chances of other things happening as a way to get a feel for the odds, for example you're (apparently) more likely to be killed by a vending machine (1 in 112,000,000), become US president (1 in 10,000,000), or become an astronaut (1 in 12,000,000), than win the powerball.

Of course, just because your program never found the right numbers, doesn't mean it couldn't. People do win...

the chance of becoming POTUS is ridiculous. that chance goes way up if you're a white Christian male lawyer with an Ivy League education, and go way down if you're anything but.

I'm curious about some of those numbers. In particular, it seems unlikely that one is more likely to become US President than an astronaut given that we have an order of magnitude more astronauts than presidents. Are the populations different?

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