I was setting up the digital picture frame in my office today and I came across this picture. It's really a great one of my parents with Dalton. This is frankly amazing when you think about it. Johann's are notorious for taking bad pictures. I have two wedding albums to prove it. I generally have 5 pictures taken of me for any occasion in hopes that one will be acceptable.
Dalton used to have these perfectly natural smiles whenever he realized that we were taking his picture. Somewhere in his twos, genetics took over and they became the forced rictus that we Johanns are well known for.
To emphasize the improbability of this picture, lets do some math.
Assume that there is a 20% chance (overestimated I assure you) that any given Johann will have a moderately natural facial expression in a given picture.
If you have three Johanns in a picture then your odds of everyone looking natural are...
20% x 20% x 20% = 0.8%
So, if you want a good picture of 3 Johanns, you should plan to take over 100 shots to get it. Of course, one of us is likely to go berserk around shot 12.
But that assumes that the Johann photogenecity probabilities are independent. Maybe you might luck out and find that they are correlated with some environmental variable, in which case maybe you only have to take 40 or 50 shots to get a good 3 Johann picture...
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