10-12Roughly the chances of getting heads 40 times in a row on a fair coin.
10-9
0.000 000 001
Lottery: The odds of winning the Grand Prize (matching all 6 numbers) in the US Powerball Multistate Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as at 2003, are 120,526,770 to 1 against, for a probability of 8 × 10-9.
Lottery: The odds of winning the Jackpot (matching the 6 main numbers) in the UK National Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as at 2003, are 13,983,816 to 1 against, for a probability of 7 × 10-8.
10-6
0.000 001
one millionth
Poker: The odds of being dealt a royal flush in poker are 649,739 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.5 × 10-6
Poker: The odds of being dealt a straight flush (other than a royal flush) in poker are 72,192 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.4 × 10-5
Poker: The odds of being dealt a four of a kind in poker are 4,164 to 1 against, for a probability of 2.4 × 10-4
Poker: The odds of being dealt a full house in poker are 693 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.4 × 10-3
10-3
0.001
one thousandth
Poker: The odds of being dealt a flush in poker are 508 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.9 × 10-3
Poker: The odds of being dealt a straight in poker are 254 to 1 against, for a probability of 4 × 10-3
HIV: About 1.2% of all 15-49 year-old humans were infected with HIV at the end of 2001
Lottery: The odds of winning any prize in the UK National Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as at 2003, are 54 to 1 against, for a probability of about 0.018 (1.8%)
Poker: The odds of being dealt a three of a kind in poker are 46 to 1 against, for a probability of 0.021 (2.1%)
Lottery: The odds of winning any prize in the US Powerball Multistate Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as at 2003, are 36.06 to 1 against, for a probability of 0.028 (2.8%)
Poker: The odds of being dealt two pair in poker are 20 to 1 against, for a probability of 0.048 (4.8%).
In NCAA basketball, players are not to wear digits above 5, and they are limited to one or two digits, making 42 distinct combinations (although 01, 02, 03, 04, and 05 typically aren't used). Since the roster limit is typically around 12, this doesn't present that much of a problem.
In North American professional sports, players typically wear uniform numbers from 1 to 99. In some sports, 0 and 00 are also allowed, making 101 different combinations.
There are 100 Senators in the United States Senate.
There are 128 characters in the ASCII character set.
There were 191 member states of the United Nations as of 2003.
Geographic places: The NIMA GEOnet Names Server contains approximately 3.88 million named geographical features outside the United States, with 5.34 million names. The USGS Geographic Names Information System claims to have almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features within the United States.
Species: The World Resources Institute claims that approximately 1.4 million species have been named, out of an unknown number of total species (estimates range between 2 and 100 million species).
Chess: There are 2 279 184 solutions to n-Queens Problem for n = 15
Playing cards: There are 2 598 960 different 5-card poker hands that can be dealt from a standard 52-card deck.
Web sites: as of July 2003, the Netcraft web survey estimates that there are 42 million distinct web sites
Cataloged stars: The Guide Star Catalog II has entries on 998,402,801 distinct astronomical objects
Computational limit of a 32-bit CPU: 2 147 483 647 is equal to 231-1, and as such is the largest number which can fit into a signed (two's complement) 32-bit integer on a computer, thus marking the upper computational limit of a 32-bit CPU such as Intel's Pentium-class computer chips.
Base pairs in the genome: approximately 3×109base pairs in the human genome
Stars in the observable universe: there are very approximately estimated to be 7 × 1022stars in the observable universe, based on galaxy counts and star estimates: [1] (http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/1/2003/07/22/story004.html)
Fundamental particles in the observable universe: various sources estimate the total number of fundamental particles in the observable universe in the range 1080 to 1085. However, these estimates are best regarded as guesswork.
107,235,733, order of magnitude of largest known prime number, as of January 2005. The exact value of that record prime is 224036583 - 1. Proving prime numbers with a thousand to several tens of thousands of decimal digits, depending on special form, can be done in minutes on modern computers.
Seth Lloyd's paper Computational capacity of the universe (http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0110141) provides a number of interesting dimensionless quantities
E15 states that she contacted the hotline number (corporate number) on 6/18/01 and reported that E14 was not able to care for 3 residents because he had touched them inappropriately.
E15 stated that E14 was shocked when she saw him as he was climbing out the bedroom window, E15 was able to see E14 when the bathroom light shone on him as the door was opened.
E15 stated that E14 would disappear for hours--would be on the phone with E13, former DON and E14 would say "if you don't like it talk to the boss" and would try to hand the phone to her.