Every once in a while I find myself using the term "nonzero." I actually use it quite a lot in the book I'm currently working on, which touches on a lot of subjects where probabilities come up. Today one of my friends questioned just what it was supposed to mean.
On the face of it, nonzero would just mean greater than zero. I've seen it phrased both ways, but I think nonzero has a more precise meaning. Greater than zero can easily be interpreted as being likely. Nonzero is, generally, used where there really is no chance something will happen, but you can't entirely rule it out, either.
For instance, there is a nonzero chance that some afternoon Candi Summers will show up at my front door lusting after my body. It is nonzero, rather than zero, because I exist, the door exists, and Ms Summers exists (though I doubt that's her real name). Therefore it always remains possible that all three will at some point be in the same location at the same time.
There would probably be a better chance if, a) I still looked more like this off-duty soldier hanging around a bar in Atami in 1969, b) the girl had ever heard of me, and c) I was as rich and famous as I ought to be after writing four books and editing several more.
As it is, I figure the chances are slightly less than they are that a genuine Sasquatch (not the actor in the beef jerkey commercials, a real one) will show up on Letterman with Jack Hannah.
So nozero doesn't mean likely. It means vanishingly small. It's the sort of result you give when you're asked to prove a negative. There is always a nonzero chance that some unknown thing exists, whether you're talking about God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Bertrand Russell's teapot. There is a nonzero chance that just about anything exists.
This is presumably why even Richard Dawkins recently said that, at least technically, he'd have to be called an agnostic, because there was really no way he could absolutely prove there was no God. He couldn't find any evidence to prove that there was, but there was always that tiny chance that the evidence was there somewhere. I think you'll still find him mostly going with Atheist, though.
Closer to home, I suppose there is at least a nonzero chance that the Republican Party will return to its roots and kick the ex-Southern Democrats to the curb. Gingrich is intelligent, and seems to have a grasp of reality, but doesn't dare show it if he wants to have a chance. Santorum is like the White Queen, seemingly able to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast. Romney is probably too rich, but at the moment seems to have the best chance.
Maybe we'll get lucky, have a brokered convention where no one arrives with the nomination locked up, and the delegates will tell all of them to take a flying leap and nominate a traditional Republican instead. This is, after all, the party that ended slavery, created the National Park System, and ended segregation. I'm not really sure how we ended up as the party most likely to try to replace science with mythology in public education, but I know Barry Goldwater wouldn't have anything nice to say about that.
Well, I suppose there's also a nonzero chance we'll manage to nominate and elect a modern Republican along the lines of Teddy Roosevelt. I just don't see him running for job right now.
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