(FORTUNE Magazine) – Dear Mr. Statistics: Browsing through the Statistical Abstract, as is my wont, I observe that the number of humans working for the Department of Agriculture has risen by 363% since 1932, a period in which the number of people actually working on American farms has declined by 68%. Here is my sarcastic question. Assuming that these trend lines continue into the future, how long do we have to wait before there are more bureaucrats than farmers? -- Urban Wiseacre. Dear Urb: Your figures, basically correct, show USDA personnel rising at a 2.7% average annual rate during 1932-89, a period in which farmers' numbers were declining at a 2% rate. The recent figures show the farmers at 3,199,000, vs. 122,062 public sectorites in the department. Assuming that the rates of growth and decline remain unchanged, the great crossover will take place early in 2059, when each side will have about 800,000 players. Dear Mr. Statistics: As a Baltimore baseball fanatic of long standing -- in a previous life I saw John J. McGraw play third for the Orioles in 1893 -- I have made a major effort to secure an opening-day seat at the team's new Camden Yards stadium, lovingly designed to maximize Cal Ripken's batting average. Most seats were reserved for season ticket holders and others with records of multiple purchases, but Orioles management has been running a lottery in which less-privileged folks like me gained the right to purchase a seat. Terms of this deal: You enter by mailing in a postcard. You can send in as many cards as you wish, but management states that only 4,000 seats will be reserved for us. I mailed in 45 postcards but was then stunned when the team announced that something like 250,000 were received altogether. Do I have a prayer of getting a seat? -- Reincarnated Rooter. Dear R 2: You may be surprised to learn that you are actually favored to get a seat: If 250,000 entries are in fact competing for 4,000 seats, your 45 entries would give you a 51.4% chance of coming up with at least one winner. This somewhat counterintuitive result is typical of situations wherein successive multiplications rapidly convert an overwhelming probability of failure on a single trial to a good possibility of success in multiple trials. Incidentally, there is an estimated 100% probability of your being able to buy a seat anyway, as a high fraction of the other entries will have been submitted by free-market enthusiasts who are expected to reoffer their winning pasteboards at competitive prices. Dear Mr. Statistics: I cannot believe that it is already spring and you have still not served up the correlation coefficient relating measures of political liberalism to number of checks bounced in the House bank, and what are you waiting for? Mother's Day? -- Conservative in a Hurry. Dear Hurrycon: We had hoped for better data, but have now relented and decided to work with the incomplete list of 142 bouncers named in Newsweek's March 23 issue. Matching up the 1991 ratings each of the 142 received from Americans for Democratic Action with the number of checks each bounced (and assuming that the number was five when the pol admitted to ''a few'' or ''several''), we discover that there is indeed a positive correlation between liberalism and bounces. But it appears to be weak. Positive correlations range between 0 and 1.0, and the figure for this sample is only 0.2. Are you sorry you asked?