Finding Shit is Hard

It turns out that finding rare things in a sea of normal things is hard.  Incidentally, that’s what we rely upon when we go through TSA screening and they look for weapons on our person or in our carry-on baggage.

From the NPR Article:

“If you stick those 20 bags into a stack of 40 bags, so on average there’s a gun and knife in 50 percent of the bags,” Wolfe says, “people missed about 7 percent of the bags.”

But when he took the exact same 20 bags and stuck them in a stack of 2,000 bags so that the targets showed up only 2 percent of the time, people got significantly worse. “All of a sudden, people were missing about 30 percent of the bags,” Wolfe says.

Huh.  Well, now TSA screeners are going to be looking at baggage and nekkid pictures, so I bet they get super better at this.  Right? Right?