John Traynor said:
(1) The odds of one individual experiencing so many optical disasters with one brand is beyond my computational ability.
Well, that's what i thought too, and since i am all "shook - up" from spending a year and a half analyzing data and writing a dissertation, i said to myself: "what would be the odds of such an event actually happening, more precisely,
what would be the odds of a series of four events happening to the same person (out of all Leica customers) when purchasing a product with a rate of failure (defect rate) of 0.001%.
Bare with me here:
I considered 4 consecutive purchases of a defective pair of binoculars by mork, who is one of 10,000 Leica customers in USA, and 1 pair of Leica binoculars are defective for every 1000 sold. Now, the numbers may be different, mork may have purchased 3 binoculars, Leica may have fewer or more customers, and fewer than 1 in 1000 binoculars may be sold defective. It would not change the results by much. One may also argue that greater than 1 in 1000 Leica binoculars are sold defective. Even at 1 defective pair for every 100 sold, the the overall odds are unbelievable.
Here is what i did:
I used logistic regression, a statistical procedure commonly used in medical sciences for studies such as “died/survived”, and I used SAS software to randomize and analyze data.
Without going into details, I will tell you that mork’s odds of winning the lottery are greater by a significant margin than his odds of consecutively purchasing 4 defective Leica binoculars.
So, there are only two possibilities:
One: mork should better start buying lottery tickets fast, before he runs out of luck
Two: he is a damn liar.