i bought 1,050 fortune cookies .
a week later , the fivethirtyeight offices welcomed three bulk boxes of the purportedly portentous pastries ; within yet another week , after assiduous disassembly , categorization , alphabetization and digitization , i was able to say with resounding confidence : those jerks only sent 1,035 cookies .
sure , we know how fortune cookies are made , but i wanted to break inside the dough and find out what could be learned from the wisdom within : the fortunes , the “ lucky numbers ” and even the lessons in mandarin .
” and while the fortune cookie distribution differs from most english in a number of ways — for instance , way more sentences beginning with “ you ” — i ’d venture , given our 54 percent coverage , that there could be roughly 1,200 to 1,600 fortunes in the overall corpus .
— but breaking open a cookie and attempting to find a higher truth is an inexplicably satisfying way to end a takeout meal .
the obverse side of the fortunes repeat more often ; there were just 556 unique combinations of lucky numbers on the back of those fortunes , and 173 individual mandarin vocabulary words and phrases .
but just eating them was n’t enough .
despite the 15 - cookie sample size to crack wide open .
so we ’re far from a census here , but we also know the approximate distribution of first letters in sentences , thanks to cryptographers who need to keep such information handy .