What Are the Odds...

Of Barack Obama being related to Dick Cheney?

100 percent, according to Lynne Cheney, the VP's wife ,who told the BBC that she traced a common ancestor of the two men to be a 17th century immigrant from France.

So Dick Cheney is part French, has a daughter who is a lesbian, and now a black cousin? Good thing he's not running for the Republican nomination.

(Surprising ancestries are not all that rare. In May we found out Warren and Jimmy Buffett are distant cousins, tracing their ancestry back some 600 years.)

And what are the chances of the Red Sox coming back to win their series against the surprisingly dominant Cleveland Indians? Clay Davenport of Baseball Prospectus has their chances at just 13 percent.

Although that's low, Sox fans should take faith in that those odds are a lot higher than when Beantown miraculously came back against the Yankees in 2004, right?

Not quite. While at the time it felt like a once-in-a-million year feat, Nate Silver, also of Baseball Prospectus, points out that it was actually a once-in-a-16-year feat.

Why did it feel so unbelievable then? Because best-of-seven series happen only three times a year in baseball, and series in which a team takes 3-0 lead are even more rare.

"The Red Sox might have been the first team to pull off the feat, but only 25 teams before them had had the opportunity. If the team leading the series and the team trailing series were of equal strength--meaning a team trailing 3-0 has a 1-in-16 chance of going on to victory--we'd expect the trailing team to have come back to win the series 1.625 tries in 26. Instead, they've come back one time out of 26. We can't draw any conclusions from that."

Silver goes onto show that if we factor in a team's relative strength, we'd expect them to come back from 3-0 down about 4.1 percent of the time, or once in 24 chances. In reality, it's happened once in 26 times.