The Stupid Coin Flip Problem

I’m really not that interested in talking about this again, but I read a passage (about an entirely different topic) that made me think about this. Here’s the passage:

You can flip a coin 100 times and have it come up tails 60 times. It’s an unlikely result, but it happens. About 3 percent of the time, you’ll get 60 or more tails.

You can flip it again the next day, and it can come up tails 60 times again. This is possible, and no doubt has been done before. (Again. Don’t do this. It is so boring! Read more football instead. That’s a good use of your limited time on our doomed planet.)

If you flip the coin 100 times for 100 days, though, you’re not going to keep getting tails 60 percent of the time. Regression, the most powerful arm of probability, will tug the percentage back toward 50 percent. It just will. It doesn’t have a choice, and neither does the coin.

I’ll go over what stands out in the comment below.

Solve the Brewster’s Millions Challenge

Montgomery Brewster could receive a lot of money if he could overcome one challenge–namely, he had to spend $30 million dollars in one month–basically $1 million a day. In the challenge, I believe only a smart percentage could be given away. Additionally, if he bought or did anything of value, the value would be added to the remaining balance. This was from a movie, that most of you know, and maybe the amount would be different now. In any event, I like thinking about ways I would overcome this challenge. How would you solve this challenge?