Here are the hard facts about winning the lottery.

From the odds of winning to who’s playing Powerball and where it all began, the following Powerball statistics and facts will blow your mind!

Living organisms need to maintain energetic homeostasis. For many species, this implies taking actions with delayed consequences. For example, humans may have to decide between foraging for high-calorie but hard-to-get, and low-calorie but easy-to-get food, under threat of starvation. Homeostatic principles prescribe decisions that maximize the probability of sustaining appropriate energy levels across the entire foraging trajectory. Here, predictions from biological principles contrast with predictions from economic decision-making models based on maximizing the utility of the endpoint outcome of a choice. To empirically arbitrate between the predictions of biological and economic models for individual human decision-making, we devised a virtual foraging task in which players chose repeatedly between two foraging environments, lost energy by the passage of time, and gained energy probabilistically according to the statistics of the environment they chose. Reaching zero energy was framed as starvation. We used the mathematics of random walks to derive endpoint outcome distributions of the choices. This also furnished equivalent lotteries, presented in a purely economic, casino-like frame, in which starvation corresponded to winning nothing. Bayesian model comparison showed that—in both the foraging and the casino frames—participants’ choices depended jointly on the probability of starvation and the expected endpoint value of the outcome, but could not be explained by economic models based on combinations of statistical moments or on rank-dependent utility. This implies that under precisely defined constraints biological principles are better suited to explain human decision-making than economic models based on endpoint utility maximization.

The United States military conscripted approximately 1.9 million service personnel into their ranks over the course of the Vietnam War. Commonly known as the draft, conscription had been conducted in the U.S. through the Selective Service System (SSS) since 1917. Initially, the draft was conducted using a random ballot by the SSS. When a person was called up by the draft, they had to report to their local draft board to evaluate their draft status. The various exemptions which draft-eligible men could use to avoid service, such as still being in university education or being medically unfit, were thought to allow better-connected and middle class men to evade the draft more easily than working class or minority men. The SSS responded to criticism of the draft system by conducting draft lotteries beginning in 1969. These draft lotteries were conducted based on birth dates, with the probability of conscription being higher for those men with birth dates which were selected earlier in the lottery. The lotteries were televised events, with millions of Americans tuning in. Opposition and the end of the draft
Conscription fueled anti-war attitudes among the public in the United States, particularly among young men eligible for service and student protesters on university campuses. Anti-war student groups began to organize events where students were encouraged to burn their draft cards in an act of defiance. Resistance to the draft grew throughout the conflict, with more people filing as conscientious objectors to the war in 1972 than actual inductees via the draft. Some of those who could not evade being drafted through the various exemptions available chose to flee the United States to countries such as Canada. Recent estimates suggest up to 100,000 men left the U.S. during this period for this reason. Due to the draft's role in driving anti-war sentiment, civil disobedience making its use untenable, and growing evidence that an all-volunteer military would be more effective, Richard Nixon campaigned in the 1968 presidential election to abolish the draft. The draft was finally ended in 1973, with the last conscripted men entering the U.S. military on June 30 of that year.