Got that jingle in my jeans

The BBC has an article up contemplating some of the things you can do with math. One is pretty much pointless:

We are just reaching the 20th anniversary of the last time an openly gay football player played in England's the top four divisions - Justin Fashanu at Torquay United.

I wanted to work out what the chances were that no league footballer in that time has been gay, whether openly so or not, assuming that there was no reason for the proportion of gay footballers to differ from the proportion of gay people in society as a whole.

Many surveys have tried to decide what proportion of British men are gay. Answers have ranged wildly from 1.5% to 6% so I took the lowest figure of 1.5%.

 

 

 Divide one by this - it's the chance of there having been no gay Premier League player since 1993

 

In those 20 years, 13,600 players have appeared in the league. The chance of picking 13,600 men randomly from the whole population and none of those being gay is one chance in five times 10 to the power of 90. That's one in five with 90 noughts. To make a slightly more understandable number, I then looked at Premier League players of which there have been 3,200 in the past 20 years.

The chances of there being no gay footballer among those is 1 in 10 to the power of 21, which is one and 21 noughts. To illustrate how unlikely that is - if the entire earth's surface was covered with drawing pins edge to edge, the chance of you picking up one specific drawing pin at random would be 200 times higher than the chance there being no gay player in the Premier League over the past 20 years.

No doubt there have been many gay players in the Premier League, but perhaps not as many as proportionally as in the country as overall - we don't really know. 

On the other hand, this bit puts the hullabaloo about money in American politics into an interesting perspective:

 

In my opinion, the most eye-popping statistic in 2012 was the amount of money that the Americans spent on their election.

 

Dollars spent on US election, per American 

 

They spent $2.5bn (£1.54bn) on the direct presidential campaign but when you throw in all the money for the Senate races and the House of Representatives you end up with about $6bn dollars of total spending on the campaigns.

If you work it out per person in the US, it's about $18 (£11). The last general election in the UK was $0.80 (50p) per person and the last Canadian election was about $8 per person.

However there's a rather interesting catch. If you look at the sheer size of the US economy and the amount invested in elections, then the American number may not be so large after all.

My other eye-popping statistic of the year was that Americans spent $7bn on potato chips this year and about $8bn on the Halloween celebrations.

There are some people then who say that spending around $6bn on an election is not that bad, especially when you compare it to the other things that Americans could spend money on in a consumer culture.