RANDOM SNEEZE CALL
随机祝福电话
Q. If you call a random phone number and say “God bless you,” what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed?
Q．如果你随机拨打一个电话号码，然后说“上帝保佑你”。那么有多大几率接电话的那人刚打过喷嚏？
——Mimi
——米米
A. IT 8217;S HARD TO FIND good numbers on this, but it 8217;s probably about 1 in 40,000.
A．这个几率有点难算，不过大致是四万分之一这么个几率。
Before you pick up the phone, you should also keep in mind that there 8217;s roughly a 1 in 1000,000,000 chance that the person you 8217;re calling just murdered someone.1 You may want to be more careful with your blessings.
在你拿起电话前首先要记住，有十亿分之一的几率你要打给的那人刚杀了一个人。1所以在你送出祝福的时候最好小心一点。
However, given that sneezes are far more common than murders,2 you 8217;re still much more likely to get someone who sneezed than to catch a killer, so this strategy is not recommended.
不过很显然打喷嚏的几率要比谋杀高出许多，2所以接电话的那人刚打过喷嚏还是很有可能的。至于想用这个方法抓住杀人犯……你还是回去洗洗睡吧。
Mental note: I 8217;m going to start saying this when people sneeze.
友情提示：当有人打喷嚏时我就会这么说
Compared with the murder rate, the sneezing rate doesn 8217;t get much scholarly research. The most widely cited figure for average sneeze frequency comes from a doctor interviewed by ABC News, who pegged it at 200 sneezes per person per year.
和谋杀率相比，没有多少学术研究会关注打喷嚏率这玩意儿。而被引用次数最多的人均打喷嚏频率来自于一名受ABC广播公司采访的医生，他觉得平均每人每年会打200次喷嚏。
One of the few scholarly sources of data on sneezing is a study that monitored the sneezing of people undergoing an induced allergic reaction. To estimate the average sneezing rate, we can ignore all the real medical data they were trying to gather and just look at their control group. This group was given no allergens at all; they just sat alone in a room for a total of 176 20-minute sessions.3
在为数不多的几个学术数据来源中，有一个研究诱使受试者产生过敏反应，然后监测他们打喷嚏的情况。为了估计平均打喷嚏的频率，我们不妨直接忽略这个研究打算采集的所有真实医疗数据，转而关注实验中的对照组。对照组里的受试者完全不接触过敏原，他们只是在一个房间里共计做了176个20分钟的实验流程。3
The subjects in the control group sneezed four times during those 58 or so hours,4 which-assuming they sneeze only while awake-translates to about 400 sneezes per person per year.
对照组中的受试者在这58小时左右的时间里一共打了4次喷嚏4，假设他们只在醒着的时候才会打喷嚏，那么相当于每人每年会打约400个喷嚏。
Google Scholar turns up 5980 articles from 2012 that mention “sneezing.” If half of these articles are from the US, and each one has an average of four authors, then if you dial the number, there 8217;s about a 1 in 10,000,000 chance that you 8217;ll get someone who-just that day-published an article on sneezing.
在谷歌学术搜索的帮助下，我们找到了5980篇2012年发表的提到“打喷嚏”的论文。假设这其中有一半的论文是在美国发表，并且平均一篇论文有4位作者，那么你有一千万分之一的几率打给了一个正好在当天发表了一篇关于打喷嚏的论文的作者。