Day 72: The plague house

Maybe I'm overstating things a bit, but I arrived home to Exile #2 telling me through her coughing that Exile #3 has a 104 °F temperature and Exile #4 protesting that she's still ill so as not to be upstaged.

The girls seem to have had one illness after another since we arrived here and, since they had had very few in the UK, it seems hard to believe it is coincidence. Of course it's entirely possible that I am simply demonstrating my innumeracy.

It has to be said that innumeracy sometimes makes life interesting and not always in a good way. The families who were accused of child-murder after multiple cot-deaths have suffered a great deal because of it. You can read a detailed condemnation of the application of statistics including my favourite archery illustration of one of the fallacies. Other examples are more fun. The Monty Hall problem dates from a TV game show in which the winning contestant was given the opportunity to win a grand prize by choosing one of three doors. Behind the doors were one car (desirable) and two goats (less so). OK so far. The 'problem' is that always, after the contestant picked a door, but before opening it, the host (Monty Hall!) would open one of the other doors always revealing a goat and the contestant would then be allowed to stick with their original door or switch to the other. When someone published an article saying that there was a correct thing to do in this situation, she was 'corrected' by a number of eminent mathematicians who told her that of course the contestant had the same chance of winning whether they stayed or swapped. You can read all about it but in my experience even after being shown the proof some very smart and generally numerate people can find it hard to accept.

Anyway, whether it is misrepresented chance or that the girls (in particular) have been exposed to different strains of germs since we arrived, we're getting pretty fed-up of the repeated trips to the doctors and having sick girls moping around the house. We must be done with the goats by now surely?

By the way, Exile #3 is pictured a few days ago in good health trying out Exile #5/Native #1's Moses Basket for size - amazingly she still fits in it having supposedly grown out of it more than four years ago. She has now retreated to her own bed - hopefully to make a quick recovery.