Posted by John Nichols on January 05, 2012 at 06:39:28 user Mcneacail.
In Reply to: Re: Clear Ransome influence posted by Eric Abraham on January 05, 2012 at 05:50:14:
1. The lower Eifel Lift on the bottom is glass sided as you look out and glass bottomed if I am correct. She was nine, and hates glass sided elevators. I had to carry her on, she was over my shoulder and screaming. She is not afraid of heights merely elevators. I told her, I bought the tickets, I am going and you are coming, period.
2. When we climbed Old Man, I told her, also aged nine, that she got one third of her chocolate at the halfway point up, on top and on way down. If she complained or asked for chocolate before those points I would eat her one third share. She did about 1/6th of the way up and I ate it. She stopped complaining on the day, but has berated me with this story for ever.
Statistics: If one has 4 children then there are 0.5**4 combinations, which is 16. Of these only 1 has all four boys, which is a 6.255 chance, same with girls, the table is merely the binary numbers from 1 to 16 with zero shown -
0 0 0 0 4
0 0 0 1 3
0 0 1 0 3
0 0 1 1 2
0 1 0 0 3
0 1 0 1 2
0 1 1 0 2
0 1 1 1 1
So not caring if 0 is a girl or a boy, you choose yourself as it is symmetric and therefore irrelevant, there are
combinations:
Boys Girls Total
0 4 1 6.25%
1 3 4 25.00%
2 2 6 37.50%
3 1 4 25.00%
4 0 1 6.25%
16
Therefore there is a 40% ~ chance that a story with 4 children is exactly 2 and 2. Of course the chances that it is the same combination of boy girl, girl, boy is only 1 in 16.
So in court, I would argue that a story in the 1990's set on Peel Island with boy, girl, girl and boy was plagiarized in part from AR, whilst a boy, girl story was not. One would argue on the stats.