View the original

Arkansas's first Powerball drawing will be tonight.  You can watch the drawing tonight on KARK Channel 4 at 10:00 p.m.  Drawings will be on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  Tonight's jackpot is $66 million.

For those of you who have a particular interest in the lottery, you should pick up a good read by Matthew Sweeney called "The Lottery Wars."  Sweeney talks about the long odds of multi-state lotteries like Powerball. 

"A mathematician at Stanford University, Keith Devlin, described the odds of winning a Powerball drawing this way: 'Imagine a standard NFL football field.  Somewhere in the field, a student has placed a single, small, common variety of ant that she has marked with a spot of yellow paint.  You walk onto the field, blindfolded, and push a pin into the ground.  If your pin pierces the marked ant, you win.  Otherwise, you lose.  Want to give it a go?'"