ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 15, 1996 TAG: 9602150045
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: What's on your mind?
SOURCE: RAY REED
Q: During hockey games at the Roanoke Civic Center, why do the city, Police Department and security people allow children to smoke in the hallway? A security guard told me they don't enforce the smoking-age limit because the Police Department doesn't enforce it.
D.H., Roanoke
A: Smoking-age limits are in the state code but not on the front burner of law enforcement.
"Enforcement has been notoriously disregarded. Police have been notoriously lax," said Hilton Oliver, a Virginia Beach lawyer who is executive director of Virginia GASP, formally called the Group to Alleviate Smoking in Public.
The law he's talking about is 18.2-371.2, which prohibits purchase or possession of tobacco products by anyone younger than 18. Prosecutors and police can get away with being lax because the law says they "may issue a summons" for a violation. The "may issue" phrase allows for discretion by officers.
The maximum penalty is a $50 fine for the first offense - a civil penalty, less serious than a misdemeanor.
There's been some pressure on stores to curb sales to minors, mostly because the law makes them liable under a civil lawsuit. Citations by police are rare.
Statistics help odds
A reader, G.T. of Troutville, detected a mathematical flaw in an answer last Tuesday to a question about the odds of the same combination of numbers hitting the Pick 6 Lotto twice.
"The response from Kyle Rogers of the Lottery office is wrong," G.T. said as he presented a statistical formula, rather than plain arithmetic, to explain the probability of two winning Lotto numbers duplicating one another.
After 590 drawings, there is a 2.44 percent chance that two numbers will match. That's about 1 chance in 40, far more common than the 11,964 chance quoted by the Lottery office, G.T. said.
On the second lottery drawn, 7,059,051 numbers wouldn't match, but one could. On the third drawing, there were two numbers that could match.
This progression continues for the 593 drawings that have been held, until the odds were down to about 40-1 on the past couple of drawings.
"This same calculation is often used to show that in a group of 23 people, the odds are 50/50 that two will have the same birthday," G.T. said.
For number crunchers reading this, here's G.T.'s formula: N!/M!(N-M)!, where N is the number of balls (44) and M is the number of balls selected (6).
The exclamation point is called a factorial, indicating a progressive series of multiplications done to figure probability. For example, 4! would be 4 times 3 times 2 times 1.
Abbie Kohler of the Virginia Tech mathematics department helped explain this and said it's probable that G.T. works with probabilities all the time and may have spent up to an hour on this one.
The folks at the Lottery office in Richmond acknowledged G.T.'s accuracy. They said the error resulted from a miscommunication.
Got a question about something that might affect other people, too? Something you've come across and wondered about? Give us a call at 981-3118. Or, e-mail RoatimesInfi.Net. Maybe we can find the answer.
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