Matching socks is overrated. They’re almost all pink so let her get creative with pairing them. :)
Maybe she threw out the worse-looking token of each type in an attempt at housekeeping
That’s not really something you can calculate the odds on, because the socks in the drawer weren’t chosen from a larger set
Unless you assume that each one had a mate, and you want to know the odds that, when starting from 20 socks, when she picked two socks each day for 10 days she picked half of two pairs. I’m not sure how you calculate those odds, but it’d be very unlikely.
50/50?
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Nah, she’s too young for to be playing a trick on me. Whenever she gets home, the fist things she does is taking off her socks, so we find socks everywhere in the house. She often wears mismatched socks, but this just baffles me. Not a single pair, I swear that’s the content of the drawer.
Whenever she gets home, the fist things she does is taking off her socks,
Watch her take off the socks noting where she leaves each one. Could we be seeing a higher rate of lost socks because of how she chooses to discard the left sock from her foot vs the right sock? Is there perhaps a piece of furniture underneath which is all the missing mates to her socks?
I find socks everywhere, under furniture, in every room, etc. I mean, I knew she would often has mismatched socks, but damn, how did we got to that point?
I work in child care. If you don’t glue something important to your child, they’ll lose whatever it is. Our school’s lost and found looks like a thrift store was set up in the middle of the school. Honestly it’s astounding. If I came home without my jacket, being cold would be the lest of my issues.
Depends on how many pairs the drawer started with.
I’m imagining that initially there were say 100 socks in the drawer (50 distinct pairs) and each day she randomly chooses two socks (already very unlikely to be a pair) and has some chance of losing one or both.
In this scenario it does seem intuitively reasonable that when it gets down to 20 there might not be any pairs left, but I don’t know how to math it. I am pretty sure that the higher the number of initial (non-overlapping) pairs, the more likely it will end (at 20) with none left, but again the math is beyond me.
That’s why I uniformly sample my socks.
100% if she’s throwing them away as a style choice
Off the top of my head, if we formulate it as: what are the chances that out of 10 pairs of socks we randomly pick 1 of each so that we end up with 10 non-matching socks, that is calculable and certainly the chances would be extremely low, but I can’t be bothered to calculate it precisely. Also, it’s easy to get these things wrong. I’d think that if there’s N socks in total it would be something in the order of 1/N! So yeah pretty low odds indeed.
