The odds of Arnold’s Fuck You

Pub date October 28, 2009
WriterTim Redmond
SectionPolitics Blog

By Tim Redmond

Wow, this thing got a lot of attention — I think it shows how much fascination the world has with our lame, incompetant and famous governor. Check out the comments and you’ll notice something else: The minute Matier and Ross on sfgate picked this up, the right-wing nuts started weighing in, which makes you wonder (or not wonder) who exactly reads the San Francisco Chronicle.

At any rate, Supervisor David Chiu has done the math and concludes that it’s highly unlikely this was a mistake:

Assuming it was real, I calculated the probability that this is pure
chance. Assuming it’s a 1/26 chance for each particular letter, the
probability that this is random is one out of 8,031,810,176.