duckburgian improbabilities

[Lunnan & Hjort]

Kristian Pedersen mentions the glorious improbabilities we meet 
in Duckburg, and more specifically those concerning Gladstone's luck.
His speculations brought smiles upon the faces of Stefan Diös and 
then Donald Ault -- and then mine. Stefan writes, 

<<Or how about the coincidence that two donaldists will, separately, 
reach the same conclusion from all these vast, huge, enormous sources 
of Gladstoneness? :-) >>

exhibiting incidentally what we maillisters must acknowledge as a 
perfectly valid & appropriate smiley (a rare thing) -- since the coincidence 
he alludes to is a small & tiny & natural one, compared to the events
Pedersen has tried to analyse. If A = a typical Gladstone event 
and B = the event that gentlemen Pedersen, Diös, Ault and Hjort all 
thought about these things, then Prob(B) / Prob(A) is about (hum-tee-dum, 
where's my abakus) 10^47. Event B is relatively likely, conditional on
the fact that we all read the Barks stories with open hearts and minds;
that Barks in these cases very clearly point to them (that's the point!,
and we, the readers, we got it!); and that our minds do not shy away 
from speculation & generalisation & quantification & comparison. 

Events of type A are indeed improbably implausible & implausibly
improbable -- in our universe. Clearly, since the reports from Duckburg
give us long catalogues of such events, not only involving Gladstone,
but also Donald and the others -- probability parameters have different 
priors and simultaneous probability distributions have different structure
than we are used to. We should find it significant that when these 
for us so extraterrestially strange things happen in Duckburg, then these
do *not* cause extreme alarm or uproar or a feeling of wild surprise.
When Gyro and Scrooge lose control over their spaceship and
land in Money Bin, of all places on the surface of the globe, there's
some alarm and action, but mostly because of the money that is lying
around, not because of the witnessed improbability. Similar remarks
apply to most of the other gladstonean incidents, etc. 

One might dream up interesting "science fiction" stories, in the minds
of the Kilgore Trouts of Duckburg -- where the new, scary, strange,
otherworldly aspects of the stories they write are that probabilities 
and expectations behave ... as in California, or Florida, or Denmark! 
That would be shocking and interesting stories, with many potential
embellishments to shock and enlighten the readers of Duckburg.  

Douglas Adams lead his characteres through similar improbabilities, 
I believe via a certain elegant device termed an "improbability drive", 
which can operate at different magnitudes of speed and strength 
[I'll ask the local adamsian for a more precise reference]. Obviously 
similar devices are at work in Duckburg. 

Dostoyevskij was occasionally criticised for having his characters 
experiencing "too incredible" events. I believe he answered (this is 
imperfect translation from an imperfectly remembered Russian phrase 
late in my night): "Nothing in my books is so improbable as the events
which actually take place in ordinary people's ordinary lives." 
Perhaps Barks can say this too. 

Nils Lid Hjort 
... who would very much like to see your "scientific paper" on these
matters, Kristian P.