Why this Polish village hasn?t seen a boy born in 10 years

By extension, we can see that the probability of 12 consecutive girls being born in Miejsce Odrzanskie is (½)12 = 1/4096.In isolation, that sounds extremely unlikely – if you were told there was a one in 4,000 chance of it raining tomorrow then you probably wouldn’t bother with your umbrella. However, it’s important to remember that these odds relate to the very specific question: “What is the probability of there being 12 consecutive girls born in Miejsce Odrzanskie?”.There’s nothing special about this town in Poland – it would still have been international news if the same thing had happened in a village in Lithuania or Hungary. So, although this run of girls seems like a strange and unique event to the people of Miejsce Odrzanskie, there are in fact probably about 99 other places in the world where something similar is happening right now.Miejsce Odrza. Rather than answering the question: “What are the chances of this happening?”, we instead look at the inverse problem: “This has happened, what are the chances that it is just down to randomness?”Thinking about the world in this way helps us to realize that a lot of things that seem improbable, such as the 12 girls in a row in Miejsce Odrzanskie, are in fact completely normal and indeed expected.This article is republished from The Conversation by Craig Anderson, Lecturer in Statistics, University of Glasgow under a Creative Commons license.