If this evening’s billion-dollar Powerball drawing is anything, it’s a jackpot for data journalists.
The number of words written about the Powerball is approaching the number of dollars in the pot, but to be fair, it’s good reading.
There are lots of pieces about things that are more likely to happen than winning, like becoming the President of the United States. The LA Times has a clever interactive simulator that pits your hundred bucks against randomly generated numbers. But my favorite award goes to The Atlantic, which calculated how much it would cost if you bought every ticket combination.
Turns out it’s less than the total jackpot.
You could buy every mathematical combination for $584,402,676, and they say, before taxes, you’d potentially make a roughly 439 million dollar profit.
Then there’s a lot more math about the split jackpots, but there’s just a little time left before the drawing, so let’s stop with the math and get back to the fantasizing. Good luck, everyone.
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