A Desperate Plea for a Statistician

Having spent too much of the day in traffic missing more than my share of the lights, I got to thinking. It’s statistically probable that somewhere someone in the United States is having a phenomenally bad run of luck when it comes to stoplights. With let’s say 150M drivers in the country, what is the longest string of missed lights experienced by some poor schlub at the extreme right of the bell curve? Has one person out of those 150,000,000 hit every red light for a week? A month? All fall and not a single green light?

(I used to ask students in my philosophy of science class, “How many of you have ever dreamed of a plane crash?” You start working the numbers and you realize that when there’s a plane crash, there are probably dozens of people who are convinced they prophesized it in a dream.)

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