Kasz216 said:
NJ5 said:
I really don't think this is a coincidence. While Kasz216 is right that the probability is not exactly 1 in 8 billion due to the distribution of letters not being even, that actually probably makes this even MORE of a coincidence in this case, as the letters F U C K Y and O are among the least common in the English language:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequencies_of_letters_in_the_English_language
Furthermore, not all veto letters would have 7 lines. The number of veto letters with 7 lines (able to spell "fuck you") would be smaller than the total number of historic veto letters.
But to be on the safe side let's say the probability is 1 in 1 billion and that Arnold wrote 10 thousand veto letters, all of them with 7 lines. What is the probably that one or more spell FUCK YOU? According to my calculations, it's only 0.001% or 1 in 100,000 (I had to use a big numbers calculator given the amounts involved).
And that's why three very optimistic assumptions... in reality the probability is likely much lower.
Can it be a coincidence? Yeah... but it's extremely unlikely.
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F U C K Y and O are uncommon in general.
But at the start of words are very common. Or at least it seems that way.
Like I said I don't have an actual dictionary on me.
Additionally you have to worry about frequency of words.
To think a governor would go through all that trouble is ridiculious.
I'd find it more likely that he has a ghost writer who did it for the hell of it one broing day at the office then I would he doing it himself.
Either seems... unlikely though. It's just too... pointless.
Stuff like this pop up in newspapers all the time.
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Apparently wiki also has the frequency of starting letters of a word:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequencies_of_the_first_letters_of_a_word_in_the_English_language
All of them except for O are less common than average. And yeah we could take word frequency into account, but I think it's pointless to refine the estimates further and further as that would very hardly overcome the conservative assumptions I made earlier.
