Official "almost" paper money thread

Wow I thought it was much higher than this:


Your odds of being struck by lightning this year are 1 in 960,000. In your lifetime those odds drop to about 1 in 12,000. Your odds of being struck by lightning twice in your lifetime are 1 in 9 million, which is still a higher chance than winning the Powerball. Which is 1 in 292 million. It wasn't enough when it was 1 in 170 million, they had to raise the odds?

 

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Not me, at least not today. Combinatorics was fun, but that was a few decades ago.

I got a radar note a few years ago when I sold some silver at a coin show. I posted it here, and someone observed that it was also a trinary. I pointed out that that's not a big deal -- for a radar (or a repeater), you only get to randomly choose the first four digits, and those determine the second four. I guessed at the time that something like one in seven radar notes would be trinary, but I think that's low -- when you pick the first three digits, there's a significant chance two of them are repeats, and even if they aren't, you've got a three-in-ten chance of duplicating one in the fourth digit.

Actually, this should be pretty simple. How many ways can you get four different digits? 10 (first can be 0-10) times 9 (9 left to choose from) times 8 times 7 = 5040, or just over half the 10,000 possible combinations. Most of the remainder will be "trinaries" (three different digits), minus the number of binaries and solids.

How many solids are there? 10. 00000000 through 99999999.

How many binaries? That's trickier, and my trickery carries some 30 years of rust. But thinking sideways, there are 16 four-digit "true" binary numbers, and a binary SN just has to have two different digits, so there are 10 possibilities for the first digit and 9 for the second. So I'm guessing the number of binary radars is 10 x 9 x 16, or 1440.

So, 10000 - 5040 = 4960, minus 1440 = 3520, minus 10 = 3510 -- in other words, just over one in three radars (or repeaters, same reasoning) should be trinary. About 3 in 20 radars or repeaters should be binary. No radars or repeaters will be solids, because they'd be marketed as solids, not radars or repeaters!

Oh, and 1 out of 16 binaries should be a radar, and 1 out of 16 of them should be a repeater. I think.

Aw, man -- just when I thought I was out, you pull me back in!

 

^^^^^
Plus you have to add in the 00000001-00000100 and the 9999900-99999998
and that is going to be x 12 districts (for all of the above).
Plus the link claimed 7 of any number, and not all in a row was a fancy.
So there are many combinations there too.

 

Sounds good so far.

Here I think you've gotten in trouble, because (a) two of the 16 binaries are solids, and (b) it doesn't matter which digit you call "first" and which digit you call "second". So instead of 16 you want 14, and instead of 10 x 9 = 90 you want 90 / 2 = 45. So there are only 14 x 45 = 630 binary radars (exclusive of the solids).

Thus the number of trinary radars is

10,000 - 5040 - 630 - 10 = 4320.

Right, as long as we're counting solids as radars and repeaters and binaries. Otherwise it gets messy.

 

It's varied enormously over the years--the star rate tends to spike every time the BEP adopts new printing technology, and then slowly drift downward as they get good at doing things the new way. In recent years, star rates between 0.3% and 0.5% have been usual, but the new 50-subject $1's have been running about 1.3%, and the first series of Kodachrome $100's was over 6%. The all-time high seems to have come with the introduction of dry printing in the '50s; the 1957 $1's were 11% stars, and it appears that the first couple blocks of that series approached 30% stars.

In any case, even at the best of times, we'd expect some 300,000 stars in a regular block; and at some times there'd be several million. So unless you adopt a *very* loose definition of fancy serial numbers, fancy serial numbers are a good bit scarcer than stars.

 

I'd like to see an expert (here) take the highlights of the prior 10 or 12 posts and create a guide for newbies, "Collecting Serial Numbers of Current FR Currency."

 

I find a ton of "almost" notes... this is a recent find and an almost cool Radar that I posted in another thread

 

The jackpot that wasn't. My sad slot machine story....was down to my last 2 dollar coins on a 3-liner machine in LV. 7-7-7 popped up on bottom line, which, had I bet the $3 max bet, would have paid $1200 or so.

....better head back to Tennessee, Jed....

 

I dont know why it attached the 50, I loaded that first full size.

 

nice note some may consider that a birthday/anniversary 10/20/2010 very nice note no matter what. The $50 was a close binary darn that 7 for not being a 5 or 0 lol

 

and here is yet another ALMOST, so close but even if it was 66676667 the condition is not the best

 

that is a awesome ALMOST note thank you for sharing

 

I find this comment inappropriate.

 

it was to say a state of affliction it was not derogatory nor vulgar and broke no rules that I can think of but if you find it offensive please report it.

 

from a previous thread

 

the color on THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is that because of the photo or does it actually look like that?

 

I would guess it doesn't actually look like that in hand.
Look at those stripes inside the portrait, same thing.