• SIN welcomes “The Odds Must Be Crazy” to the network (with a piece by me!)

    The Odds Must Be Crazy is a new addition to the Skeptic Ink Network. It’s opening piece is actually a post of mine which fits nicely into their niche: a post on prayer and the coincidences involved in daily life which can be confused with successful, answered prayer. In mathematical terms, this can be explained by Littlewood’s Law. Check it out! 

    Here is the TOMBC description:

    Have you ever had the strangest thing happen to you that just seemed to be too big of a coincidence to be, well, a coincidence?

    Have you ever picked up the phone to call a friend only to inexplicably be answering a call FROM them?

    Did you ever have a dream about a celebrity and wake up to news of their death?

    Have you ever visited a different town in a different state only to run into an old friend from childhood?

    Have you noticed a particular set of numbers that seem to appear over and over again, seemingly wherever you look?

    These and many more types of coincidences or strange phenomena happen every day to people like you and me, and they tend to puzzle and confuse us when they do. They just seem too crazy to have really happened by pure chance alone. But believe it or not, when you look at the huge number of people in the world, and the absurd number of things we do each day, it would actually be far stranger if these types of things weren’t happening. But that doesn’t make it any less exciting when they do, and there are a lot of coincidences that go well beyond the simple examples we gave above.

    And that’s what the focus of this site is. In conjunction with the Independent Investigations Group, our goal is to collect and entertain you with these very everyday occurrences that seem anything but ordinary. We’ll serve them up to you as we get them and hopefully get a better idea of just how incredibly strange the world is in which we live, and how people and events can connect in all sorts of seemingly unexpected ways, even if statisticians or psychologists can explain what’s really going on.

    Speaking of statisticians and psychologists, we’ll have regular features from them to do exactly that: explain what the heck’s going on. What’s even better is that once you truly understand how these things work, the reality is actually even more interesting. Some of these concepts start standing out to us in ways we never saw or imagined before, making it easier to find them and show them off to friends and family.

    We’ll also feature articles about crazy known phenomena that you’d never believe were true if we didn’t lay out the cold, hard facts about them… and maybe you still won’t believe them after we have.

    Hopefully you’ll have a blast reading through the site, submitting your own stories both via our Submit a Story! page and via Twitter, and keep coming back to share in just how crazy things can get no matter how well we explain them.

    Listen to us on every episode of Skepticality! Well, at least the episodes since our debut. If you go too far back you’ll be disappointed. Not by the show, which is FANTASTIC, but merely because we won’t be in it, and you’ll have listened to it specifically to hear us because you read this and believed us that we were on every episode, but now, thanks to this clarification, you’ll know better. Right then. So head to Skepticality.com and subscribe, download, podcatch, etc. to catch our segment with our happy voices reading our favorite submissions and making lots of jokes of various levels of quality and conviction!

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    Article by: Jonathan MS Pearce