Whitey Grandad

Not exactly, and you know it. Being league champions was more important than winning the cup.

They're at home.

Hmm, you're easily pleased.

Oh good, someone else to blame.

What did you have to mention that? My therapist will have another twenty years work now

Good point.

Now look: The Butterfly Effect is a very limited theory that had no place in FA Cup draws. When Lorenz developed it in connection with his efforts at weather prediction it was an interesting intellectual exercise to try to explain the sensitivity of his model to small changes in its initial parameters instead of trying to find out why his model was so touchy in the first place. It, and Chaos Theory, have their place in certain fields but balls in a bag is not one of them. I am certainly not dismissing the theory nor the views of any other poster.

Mail, innit.

Interestingly (yes, really) you can influence the choice of ball by something such as temperature or surface finish. A warmer ball is more likely to be chosen than a cold one, say.

I'm not saying they were predetermined, just that the outcome of the match and the outcome of the draw are two totally unconnected events. The outcome of the draw (sequence of balls) was just as likely no matter who won or drew.

Badly worded.

The lottery balls are selected by machine, there is only a very slight human input which could equally be performed by machine.

I was using 'significant' in the statistical sense, that is whether the spread of results shows a bias to any particular number or set of numbers.

No, it's nothing to do with the butterfly effect, more a philosophical consideration, maybe Determinism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

They weren't related to my post and I thought we had dealt with them earlier.

Try this: http://www.lottery.co.uk/statistics/ Are these results significant?

No, it didn't affect the draw in any way, but we were eliminated yesterday so we shall never know who we might have drawn in the next round because we're not in it.

That has nothing to do with chaos theory. People have a tendency to be predictable, ask Derren Brown.

My son did some work with the Met Office and asked them about global warming. They said they would be happy with getting the weather right for the next four days let alone forty years.

Only for systems which are inherently unstable.

Very impressive considering she can't see her own feet, and she's carrying a cameraman on her head at the same time! Still, it's good practice for the old 4-inch beam

Of course I can. You can't say if it did or didn't cause the storms, hence my quoted aphorism.

As an example of a flawed theory. When I was at school we were taught the phlogiston theory and also that life was created from rotten meat because that's where flies came from. These are all 'what ifs'. You can think of life as one big experiment with only one outcome, you can't go back and run the experiment again. There have been studies of identical twins who were separated at a very early age. It turned out that they all ended up in similar lifestyles.

You see, this disproves your theory. Nobody's lives are affected by Saints winning or losing. Nobody who matters anyway.

It's not accepted!!!