In 1999, British solicitor Sally Clark was convicted over the deaths of her two baby sons. An expert claimed that two cot deaths in one family had only a 1 in 73 million chance, by multiplying the risks as if they were independent, which they aren't. The Royal Statistical Society condemned the calculation, and Sally Clark's conviction was overturned on appeal in 2003.
How many different structures can you build with six classic 2-by-4 Lego bricks of the same colour? The company used to quote just over 102 million. In 2005, Danish mathematician Søren Eilers recounted everything by computer: 915,103,765 combinations. The official estimate had been too low by a factor of about nine.
Fold an A4 sheet in half and you get an A5 with the same proportions. That only works for one ratio between length and width: about 1.414, the square root of 2. The A0 format measures exactly one square metre, and A4 is a sixteenth of it. With standard 80-gram-per-square-metre paper, an A4 sheet therefore weighs exactly 5 grams.