(For math people: this can be modeled as a hypergeometric distribution with N=48, K=13, n=8, k=0.)

I suspect most people haven’t heard these terms. But they should have studied basic combinatorics in high school, and that’s all it really is. You had a pool of 48 people from whom to choose 8, but you happened to choose them from the specific pool of 35 not up for reelection. So the likelihood of that happening randomly is just 35 choose 8 / 48 choose 8, which is indeed 6.2%.

Same. Uggh. It was a bit like a fever, but so much worse. I was absolutely freezing and couldn’t stop shaking and sweating, but I also couldn’t really manage to distract myself with anything because my brain didn’t work, so I just had to lay there and wait. There was also this overwhelming, crushing ringing sound and a feeling like old analog TV static, along with a splitting headache. Thankfully my family were around, of whom I was dimly aware, so I could tell that time was probably passing, and I could kind of gauge that I probably wasn’t getting worse, or they’d take me to a hospital or something. That’s about the limit of what I was aware of, though. It just felt like it went on a really long time. I suspect in reality it didn’t last more than a few hours. I should ask; I’m sure one of them has a clearer memory of that aspect than I do.

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