Evaluating Gladstone's luck

[Kristian Pedersen]

Here's a question to ponder:

Of all the enormously improbable events that have
befallen Gladstone Gander over the years, which is the
most unlikely, statistically speaking?

I once tried writing a spoof paper, academic-style, on
the subject but didn't manage to, mainly because most
of the probabilities involved were too difficult to
compute! I shan't try to give any figures here, but
some of the probabilities would of course be
relatively easy to assess - for instance whenever
Gladstone participates in a lottery, we can get a good
estimate of the number of tickets sold (based on
reasonable assumptions about the population of
Duckburg, the size of the containers holding the lots
and so on). Other probabilities are difficult, but
perhaps not impossible, to estimate:

- Having a whale strand at the exact right moment in
"Luck of the North".
- Finding, in close succession, a coin, a bank note, a
ring, the Mona Lisa, and a treasure chest on the
sidewalk (forgot the name of this Rosa story).
- Having a million dollars dumped in his hat(by the
typhoon that spread Scrooge's money all over the
country, in the classic Barks 10-pager).

And some are well-nigh invisible:

- Finding a hollow meteor filled with precious stones,
that have obviously been processed! (in another
classic Barks 10-pager).

Being familiar with the obscenely huge numbers that
arise in the branch of mathematics known as
combinatorics, I would venture the guess that the most
unbelievably lucky event happens to Gladstone in
Barks' story about Hondorica: As I recall, Donald
tears up a treasure map in twenty-odd pieces and
throws it into the river. Whereupon the pieces
rearrange themselves into a readable map a couple of
hundred yards further down the river, where Gladstone
is fishing.

Any other opinions on this very silly matter? :)

Kristian

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