(04-08-2012 09:50 PM)Callie Cline Wrote: this is fascinating... i'm just chiming in cuz i have a great aunt who had 12 boys and guess what her 13th was? a girl finally. she was also one of 11 kids the only girl... (but not the youngest) it would be an interesting study in RL to see patterns like what you describe.
i know when my family bred dogs when i was a kid we'd have litters with sometimes equal male and female, and often buyers would "hold" a female or male, and we'd have NONE!!! our dogs had large litters being german shephards and dobermans and english springer spaniels, but anyway just wanted to chime in.
i'm sorry it's frustrating 
Callie, this isn't about one cat producing a string of one sex, this is about every box that I open from several breeding pairs in a project line. This'd be more like whole neighborhoods producing only children of one sex (the lines) in the middle of towns that produce huge runs of children of one sex (individual breeders - because a *lot* of us have noticed month+ periods where we birth mainly one sex - with some producing boys and some girls).
True randomness will produce groups and runs, there's no question about that. But what I'm seeing isn't about one run, it's about everything being out of balance. There should be groups of 1, 2, 3, not *just* long runs. Long runs should be the exception, not the rule. Overall, I'm absolutely sure the numbers work out approximately even, but that isn't a reliable indicator of randomness either, it's simply an indication of overall balance in whatever method is being used to calculate the numbers.
Since any computer-generated 'random' number is pseudo-random, at best, calculations of 'random' results via a computer is highly susceptible to bias, both as Tad pointed out as well as via the potential addition of any other factors by the programmer, including things like ranging the output of the random number generator used.
Time to reboot
