《那些古怪又讓人憂心的問題》第106期:隨機祝福電話(1)

RANDOM SNEEZE CALL

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隨機祝福電話

Q. If you call a random phone number and say “God bless you,” what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed?

Q．如果你隨機撥打一個電話號碼，然後說“上帝保佑你”。那麼有多大機率接電話的那人剛打過噴嚏？

——Mimi

——米米

A. IT'S HARD TO FIND good numbers on this, but it's probably about 1 in 40,000.

A．這個機率有點難算，不過大致是四萬分之一這麼個機率。

Before you pick up the phone, you should also keep in mind that there's roughly a 1 in 1000,000,000 chance that the person you're calling just murdered someone.1 You may want to be more careful with your blessings.

在你拿起電話前首先要記住，有十億分之一的機率你要打給的那人剛殺了一個人。1所以在你送出祝福的時候最好小心一點。

However, given that sneezes are far more common than murders,2 you're still much more likely to get someone who sneezed than to catch a killer, so this strategy is not recommended.

不過很顯然打噴嚏的機率要比謀殺高出許多，2所以接電話的那人剛打過噴嚏還是很有可能的。至於想用這個方法抓住殺人犯……你還是回去洗洗睡吧。

Mental note: I'm going to start saying this when people sneeze.

友情提示：當有人打噴嚏時我就會這麼說

Compared with the murder rate, the sneezing rate doesn't get much scholarly research. The most widely cited figure for average sneeze frequency comes from a doctor interviewed by ABC News, who pegged it at 200 sneezes per person per year.

和謀殺率相比，沒有多少學術研究會關注打噴嚏率這玩意兒。而被引用次數最多的人均打噴嚏頻率來自於一名受ABC廣播公司採訪的醫生，他覺得平均每人每年會打200次噴嚏。

One of the few scholarly sources of data on sneezing is a study that monitored the sneezing of people undergoing an induced allergic reaction. To estimate the average sneezing rate, we can ignore all the real medical data they were trying to gather and just look at their control group. This group was given no allergens at all; they just sat alone in a room for a total of 176 20-minute sessions.3

在爲數不多的幾個學術數據來源中，有一個研究誘使受試者產生過敏反應，然後監測他們打噴嚏的情況。爲了估計平均打噴嚏的頻率，我們不妨直接忽略這個研究打算採集的所有真實醫療數據，轉而關注實驗中的對照組。對照組裏的受試者完全不接觸過敏原，他們只是在一個房間裏共計做了176個20分鐘的實驗流程。3

The subjects in the control group sneezed four times during those 58 or so hours,4 which-assuming they sneeze only while awake-translates to about 400 sneezes per person per year.

對照組中的受試者在這58小時左右的時間裏一共打了4次噴嚏4，假設他們只在醒着的時候纔會打噴嚏，那麼相當於每人每年會打約400個噴嚏。

Google Scholar turns up 5980 articles from 2012 that mention “sneezing.” If half of these articles are from the US, and each one has an average of four authors, then if you dial the number, there's about a 1 in 10,000,000 chance that you'll get someone who-just that day-published an article on sneezing.

在谷歌學術搜索的幫助下，我們找到了5980篇2012年發表的提到“打噴嚏”的論文。假設這其中有一半的論文是在美國發表，並且平均一篇論文有4位作者，那麼你有一千萬分之一的機率打給了一個正好在當天發表了一篇關於打噴嚏的論文的作者。