There's A 1 In 87 Million Chance Melania Trump Didn't Plagiarize

Of all the big stories to come out of the first day of the Republican National Convention, the weirdest and most unexpected was the realization that Melania Trump (or her speechwriter) plagiarized part of her speech from Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic convention speech. 

The Trump campaign has steadfastly denied that the speech was plagiarized, and while that's pretty clearly not the case, McGill University physics professor Bob Rutledge has the stats to back that intuition up: the chances that Trump's arrangement of the allegedly plagiarized phrases was a random occurrence are roughly 1-in-87 billion:

Here's the nut of Rutledge's explanation:

That's 14 distinct phrases. They could be used in almost any ordering, with additional wording, to say the same things as Melania Trump and Michelle Obama said. 

But what is the probability that Melania Trump would say them in the exact same ordering as Michelle Obama chose to? That depends on the number of unique orderings — the number of permutations — those 14 phrases have… 

[P]retty soon, you see that the number of possible orderings of those 14 phrases that Melania Trump has in common with Michelle Obama is 14*13*12*11*10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1 … According to this calculation, there are a grand total of about 87 billion different permutations for those 14 distinct phrases

[Bob Rutledge via Huffington Post]