Category: Skepticality


Accident Down Under

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
March 3, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener  Craig.)

Hi.

I have this story this is totally legit, happened to me a few months ago.

Basically one Sunday night we heard a big crash out the front of our house. Turns out a car had crashed through our neighbour and my front fence with three young occupants (2 males, 1 female). The police came and took the relevant details and while getting names we realised the driver lived right next door to my sister, who lives two suburbs away (Melbourne, Australia). She always said they were dodgy neighbours!

Then when the my neighbours daughter in law came around to see if everything was fine she realised that she knew the female occupant of the car (who then begged not to tell her parents). Her sister was the god mother of the girl.

So it was to co-incidents in the one crash. The odd’s must be crazy!

Regards

Craig

Below are the extended notes provided by contributing editor Mark Gouch for use in Skepticality Episode 249. Mark is a wastewater treatment system operator and engineer living in Smithtown, NY (Long Island). He started to become interested in coincidences after recognizing the series of events that conspired to get him employment on Long Island many years ago. Two of Mark’s recommended books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, and “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives” by Shankar Vedantam.

Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

There is an old adage that says most car accidents happen close to home. We’ve all heard this, and it seems reasonable that since we drive to and from our homes quite often, that we probably spend a lot more time driving near our home than far away, so we would expect to have more accidents close to home.

According to DrivingToday web site , this kind of data is surprisingly not typically gathered by law enforcement or insurance companies, but the Progressive Insurance company completed a survey in 2001 to try to find out. (Gather a decent amount of data, analyze the data, and learn something. What a progressive thing to do! )

According to the site, they gathered information from people who were involved in 11,000 accidents, and found 52 % occurred within 5 miles of home and 77% within 15 miles. (Isn’t it nice when actual statistics confirm what we thought we already knew? This seems to be not usually the case. So much of what people think is true turns out not to be true when researched objectively. But that is another story).

Craig said his sister lived two suburbs away. Suburbs is not a standard unit of distance in the U.S., so we are not sure how far that is. It’s probably safe to assume the distance is 15 miles or less. If so, then the person driving had really good odds of having an accident within a radius that includes his house.

So the fact that the driver lived only two towns away has to be considered as unremarkable. Or actually: pretty likely. It would be highly unlikely for a person who lives in Canada or Argentina to have crashed into your yard.

Your neighbor’s daughter-in-law knows one of the people in the car. So let’s restate this: Not your neighbor, not his child, but the child’s spouse knew someone in the car. So the acquaintance had three “degrees of separation”, so to speak, half way to Kevin Bacon (not sure if your part of the world will get that reference).

It seems that this coincidence should be calculated by the number of acquaintances that your neighbor’s family has compared to the number of people living in the greater Melbourne area. The number of acquaintances that people have on average has been estimated by various methods to be in a wide range of between 150 and 300.

A very cool teenage acquaintance I asked said 1,500 minimum, in this, the social media age. But I think that is high. According to Robin Dunbar on the Social Science Space Web Site, a good estimate is 150. In this case we are talking about acquaintances of family members, who will have some overlap in the people they know, so let’s conservatively use 100.

So if your neighbor knows 100 people and each one of those 100 knows 100 people, then the total number of acquaintances of your neighbor and his acquaintances is 100 * 100 or 10,000. Assume your neighbors have two children, and both are married. So we have your neighbor and his wife, their two kids, and their two spouses, for a total of 6 people. Those 6 people should have about 60,000 acquaintances. Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge) indicates that about 4.5 million people live in the greater Melbourne area . So it seems that the odds of this coincidence would be about 60,000/4,500,000 or about 1.33 out of a hundred. That’s not all that low. (if we used 150 the odds come out to 3.0 out of a hundred.

  • http://www.drivingtoday.com/features/archive/crashes/index.html#axzz3SQw6YAQU
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
  • http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2013/11/robin-dunbar-on-dunbar-numbers
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne
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Clear as Glass

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
February 17, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener  Bill Walker.)

Hi, I am a contractor in New Jersey. I recently ordered 14 windows for a job. They only had 11 of the windows in stock so I agreed to accept the 11 and get the other 3 when they became available.

A few days later when the 11 windows were delivered to the jobsite I paid for them with my business credit card. They completed the transaction by having the driver call the home office and give them my credit card information. The driver gave the secretary the 6 digit total for the windows and then proceeded to give her my credit card number.

Business & Finance

As he was giving her the credit card number I heard her stop him before he finished so I asked what was wrong. It turns out that the first 6 numbers of my credit card were the exact same 6 numbers, in the same order, as the total for the delivery. She thought he was giving her the total again. And since my card grouped the first 4 numbers together there was even a space where the decimal in the total is located.

I would be interested in knowing what the odds of that happening might be. Even throwing aside the fact that I didn’t receive the complete delivery and that I chose to use that particular card it must be a very rare event.

Business & Finance

I have recounted this story to a few friends since it has happened and, to a man, the response has been “You should play those numbers”. (in the NJ Pick 6 Lottery)

When my wife suggested that to me I responded by saying that of course I should play those numbers because the same super natural force that had created the coincidence was surely going to exert it’s powers over the lottery for me too. I didn’t play the numbers.

It’s easy to see how someone who has a tendency to believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence and everything that happens has meaning would assign special significance to an event like this. And apparently even for people who seems completely rational their first response was to suggest that the numbers on my credit card and a receipt for some windows could somehow influence the outcome of a lottery.

Hopefully I won’t fall into that trap. Knock on wood.

Below are the extended notes provided by contributing editor Mark Gouch for use in Skepticality Episode 248. Mark is a wastewater treatment system operator and engineer living in Smithtown, NY (Long Island). He started to become interested in coincidences after recognizing the series of events that conspired to get him employment on Long Island many years ago. Two of Mark’s recommended books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, and “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives” by Shankar Vedantam.

Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

We’re sure it must have been at first a confusing, then a weird experience to realize that the sequence of numbers in your credit card matched the sequence of numbers in the cost for the windows. Determining the probability of this happening seems to be a pretty straightforward process. Bill also asked a few related questions that are interesting.

First of all, Bill did not mention the cost of the individual windows. Assuming they cost somewhere in the range of $120 to $500 each (based on a quick web search for single hung windows), the range of costs would be from $1,320 to $7,000. The low number in the range is estimated using the low range of cost of windows and only 11 being available. The high end of the range is estimated using the high range of the unit cost and assumes all 14 windows were available. Almost forgot this: If we assume NJ state tax of 6%, the maximum cost would be $7,420.00. This demonstrates that regardless of whether 11 or 14 windows were available, the cost would be less than $ 9,999.99, so the cost including pennies will contain six digits (Thousands, hundreds, tens, and dollars, and two decimal, or cents digits). Therefore, the fact that only 11 were available does not change anything in the probability estimate. Anything we determine is true for 11 windows available, will be true for the case of 14. We will still be talking about a series of 6 digits. Make sense?

So the question is what is the probability of a six digit series of numbers matching a different series of six digits. The possible range of six digits is 000000 to 999999. (Writing it as either digits with commas or using dollar figures makes it easier to see there are six digits). So there are one million possible sequences of numbers of six digits. And the odds would be 1 in 1,000,000, one in a million.

Now considering how many thousands of contractors there are, and how many pay for supplies in the same cost range with credit cards would be tough to estimate. But it is reasonable to expect that there are well over one million such purchases in the U.S. annually. So this probably happens at least once a year in the U.S., and probably much more often than that.

Bill mentioned the decimal point in the cost matched up to a space in the sequence of digits on the credit card. This seemed like an addition to the coincidence. He did not mention the lack of a space in the card sequence where the comma would be in the cost, which, if you consider a space in the place where the decimal was to be noteworthy, one would assume you would think that the lack of a space where the comma would be to be noteworthy also. This may be a case as Dr. Michael Shermer has pointed out many times that our brains “remember the hits and forget the misses.” But in general, we’re talking about a sequence of numbers, so let’s ignore the decimal point and comma. (Plus, in Europe they use decimals and commas in the opposite functions as we do, so thinking more globally, lets agree it is ok to ignore them.).

Now to the question of whether it is sound advice to suggest that based on this coincidence that it would be wise to purchase a lottery ticket with the same sequence of numbers. It would not. In probability these are referred to as independent events. What the sequence of numbers in a credit card number and/or an invoice amount are, will have absolutely no effect on the random numbers generated by a lottery ticket. The odds will be the same for your lottery number. But if that series of numbers were to win the lottery for you, you’d have a heck of a story to tell. It would still only be a coincidence, but a good story. So if you want to choose the same numbers for a lottery, do it for fun, but don’t do it expecting any advantage or disadvantage in your odds of winning the lottery.

Lastly, the question of whether some supernatural entity had an impact on the coincidence. Bill offered no evidence for the existence of, or the potential observed impact of a supernatural entity on the coincidence or any other event that has occurred in the real world. So it would be impossible to estimate the odds of that. We are skeptical enough to demand evidence.

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Three Trendies

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
February 3, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Michael McClure.)

I’ve been working at Disney Animation now for more than 18 years. My son was 11 months old when I started my career at the mouse. He’s now a 19 year old sophomore in college.

We were working on Tarzan a year or so after I started at Disney Animation. I got to know the Artistic Coordinator on the show, a fellow Scot musician named Fraser. One morning he called Support (where I was working at the time), so I took the ticket and went to see him. I had brought in some of my slides in a sleeve (16 slides per sleeve) a few days earlier, because I had a shot of the composer on Tarzan, one Phil Collins. However, instead of the short-haired, balding Phil of the early ’80s, my shot was from a Genesis gig in 1977 at the San Diego Sports Arena, with hirsute Phil (long hair, beard and all!) decked out in the jersey of the farm hockey team from the town that he threw on for the band’s encore of the evening, singing his heart out in a pool of red light. I’d shot the picture 20 years prior, and of course hippie Phil would be relatively unrecognizable to most folks in the late ’90s. The Tarzan production admin folks put out a printed newsletter each week containing the goings on in production-land, and I thought it would be fun to put this picture of Phil into the newsletter, to see if anyone could guess who it was.

HairyPhil

Phil Collins, San Diego Sports Arena, 1977 Genesis Concert

I brought the sleeve of slides with me to Fraser’s office, I pulled out the slides to show to him, to see if maybe my musical brethren could guess who the hairy man in the slide was.

Fraser held the sleeve up to the light, and he pondered the picture of Phil for a moment, but I saw his glance drift to one of the other slides in the sleeve. Fraser couldn’t guess who it was, and was amazed when I told him that it was a picture of Phil Collins, but he kept looking at a different slide in the sleeve. Finally, Fraser said, “Can I pull this slide out?” pointing at some random slide I had in the sleeve along with my Genesis concert pictures. I said sure, and he pulled out a picture I’d shot of some random people along Princes Street in Edinburgh, Scotland when I was there with the California Repertory Theater in the summer of 1980 for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a huge, yearly theatrical festival held in the city. Fraser inspected the slide very closely, and then looked me in the eye, and said, “This is my best friend Graham.”

“What? Really?”

“Yes. No doubt about it. This is Graham.”

3trendies

“3 trendies”

Well, that was stunning right there. The picture, as you can tell, shows three trendies (as I wrote on the edge of the slide) whom I stopped on the street that sunny day in August of 1981, and asked in my California twang if I could take their picture. The girls were fine with it, but the boy in the shot was huffy. I think he was annoyed by this ‘foreigner’ bothering them, and showed that by being annoyed and petulant in the picture (but, he was still in the picture!).

SlideSheet

The sheet of slides, showing where the two pictures were located.

HairyPhilSlide

The “P. Collins” slide

3trendiesSlide (1)

The “3 trendies” slide (dated SEP 80).

Fraser and I had a great can-you-believe-it moment about this, a good laugh, and then we went about our day.

Within 20 minutes, Fraser had called back down to my offices, asking for me. I went back to his office, where I found him, looking even more stunned. After seeing this now 16 or 17 year old picture of his Best Friend, shot by his Support Guy at Disney Animation, he just had to call Graham to tell him about it. So, he did. And things got REALLY weird.

Graham apparently picked up his phone and said hello to Fraser. Fraser explained about the photo, and Graham shrieked in his ear on the phone and hung up. I mean, Fraser said he really SHRIEKED at him, and then abruptly hung the phone up. That was it.

So, Fraser called him back.

Fraser got Graham back on the line, and after a few moments, he drew the story of the shriek and the ensuing hang up out of him. Graham was completely beside himself the entire time they were on the phone. But, in the end, it made perfect sense.

Graham told Fraser that just a few hours earlier THAT SAME DAY, he had had a conversation with his old friend — let’s call her Carol — the small brunette in my photograph. He was attempting to refresh her memory of their other friend — let’s call her Alice — the blonde in the picture. But, Carol wasn’t remembering her. She couldn’t quite place her. Apparently Alice had left Scotland not too long after I’d taken the picture of the three of them in Edinburgh, to marry the bass player of the Bay City Rollers, a then very popular pop group/boy band. She’d gone all the way to New Jersey to marry this guy, apparently. In any case, Graham was trying to remind Carol of this other girl Alice, when he said something to the effect of, “Do you remember when that Yank stopped us on Princes Street years ago and took a picture of the three of us?” hoping that would jar her memory. Maybe it did, or maybe it didn’t — I don’t remember that part. But, Graham hung up with Carol eventually, and then Fraser rung him up from the States soon after that call and said over the staticky international land line, “You’re not going to believe the picture I just saw of you and two girls on Princes Street from the summer of 1981…”

I think I would shriek, too.

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 247.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog.

There are some factors that increase the probability that Fraser would recognize someone in one of the pictures, namely the shared interest in a genre of music and probably the artist. However, it’s a pretty amazing and impressive event. I’ll add that if I was in Graham’s shoes, I would probably shriek, too. These things are bound to happen from time-to-time, of course, so there’s nothing supernatural about it, but that wouldn’t keep my jaw from hitting the floor if this had happened to me.

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New Year Coincidence, 2015

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories, Videos by Reader submission — 4 Comments
January 20, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener  Mark Gouch relayed to The Odds Must Be Crazy by Barbara Drescher.)

Here is the article (includes video) by Barry Wolf, WKYC.

Holiday & Seasonal

But how can we say this is unbelievable as they do in the article? Sorry, but I can’t help myself here…

The odds would be one out of 365 * 365 * 365, or about one out of 48.6 million births. With 7 billion people on the planet, odds are that this has probably happened about 143 times ( to living persons. many more to those in the past). So rare, fun, and interesting, but not unbelievable.

I believe it happened based on the evidence (their claim that it did, which is good enough).

Actually since everyone has to have a birthday, we can ignore the first birthday, that of the man or the woman. So the odds someone marries someone with the same birthday (date of the year) as them is 1/365.

Then the odds their baby has that same birthday would be 1/(365 * 365) or 1/133,225. So with ~7 billion people this probably happened 52,543 times to persons living on the planet now.

The error in the first calculation is that the date was selected first. That calculation is correct for any specific date, whether it is January 1st or July 4th, or March 15th, or July 22nd. Anyone with better knowlege of probability please correct me if any of the above is incorrect.

As often happens, things that seem unbelievable are quite believable and things that are believed without evidence are not believable.

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 246.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog.

Good job!

You are correct with both calculations. It depends on how you frame it. If you’re wondering the odds of two people with the birthday of January 1st marrying and having a baby on January 1st, then the first is correct, but as you pointed out, that’s not really what’s interesting.

The only thing I would add is that these calculations also assume some things that we know are not true, such as that births are uniformly distributed across the days of the year. Even if natural births were (they aren’t), we’d see fewer births on days like January 1st simply because the number of scheduled C-sections and inductions is lower because it’s a holiday. However, figuring those few things in requires data that probably isn’t available.

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Checking the Check

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
December 23, 2014

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Paul)

I live on one side of town, and I’m currently taking a college class one day a week on the other side of town about 40 minutes away. Today we got out of class about 2 hours early, so I decided that since I’m rarely on the other side of town I would use the extra time to stop by the new beer warehouse that was opened earlier this year by my wife’s former co-worker. I had never been there before but I had heard good things about it, and so I was really looking forward to checking it out.

Once inside, I chatted with my wife’s former co-worker and toured the store, sampling some beer and picking out some interesting bottles to bring home and try. Okay, so I went a little overboard and wound up with nearly a case of various microbrews and hard ciders I had never tried. I also added a growler of one of the beers I had sampled and enjoyed, and as I was at the checkout my wife’s former co-worker came over and gave me a 10% discount. I signed the credit card receipt as we talked some more, then I thanked him and departed for home.

When I got home I checked the mail and found an envelope from the New York State Tax Board. My stomach sank, and I assumed the worst: we owed some back taxes. I put off opening it for the time being while I fed the dog and let her outside to relieve herself.

Finally I decided to open the envelope to see what bad news might be awaiting me. The letter inside informed me that the state was refunding home owners a percentage of their property taxes if their school district had kept taxes capped below a certain level for the year. Ours had, and so we qualified for the rebate.

Sure enough, there was a check inside! I immediately looked at the amount to see what our windfall was. The check was in the amount of $77.26. That seemed familiar to me, as I seemed to recall the total at the beer warehouse had been seventy-something dollars but I hadn’t really been paying attention because I was distracted while talking with my wife’s former co-worker. So I pulled out my receipt and checked the amount. I did a double-take when I saw that the total was $77.26!

I had just paid $77.26 at a store, and within 30 minutes had opened an unexpected refund check from the state for the exact same amount! So I ask you: what are the odds?!?!

Below are the extended notes for use in Skepticality Episode 245 provided Edward Clint.  Ed Clint produces the Skeptic Ink Network and writes about Evolutionary Psychology, critical thinking and more at his blog Incredulous. He is presently a bioanthropology graduate student at UCLA studying evolutionary psychology.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

There is a mysterious power in the universe bending time and space, the very fabric of existence, creating amazing, inexplicable patterns. We may never fully discern its inscrutable purpose, but obviously it’s so some people can get some free beer, and occasionally scratch their heads and say “huh, how ’bout that?” Thank goodness it’s not wasting time preventing epidemics or something stupid like that.

Okay, that may have been a tad sarcastic, but their really is a mysterious force creating coincidences, and it sits between the ears. A couple of pounds of grey goo that can do amazing things, like feel bad about eating the last donut, seems pretty mysterious, to me, at least.

To understand why apparently astronomically unlikely coincidences are fairly mundane, I suggest an exercise in doing what minds are ordinarily a bit crap at: look at it from the opposite point of view, in this case, the universe’s. Imagine the mysterious cosmic power is you, except that your job is to prevent apparent coincidences that occur during random events in human affairs. Think about how much work you would have to do. Whenever a number crosses a person’s path twice or more in one day, you’d have to intervene. Whenever a popular song, movie, tv show, book (or part thereof) is referenced more than once in a short time frame, whenever two humans (who just love talking to each other) call each other at almost the same time, when two people meet and happen to share any significant detail such as hometown or favorite sports-ball team, et cetera.

That’s just a sample of the hundreds of ways people connect unconnected events. Your cosmic civil servant self would be working overtime. You would probably need to intervene in the life of every single human daily (hourly, for the numerologists).

That is, until someone says to someone else, “hey you ever notice two of the same number never show up on the same day? What’r the odds?” Then you’d have to start creating coincidences, to mimic what the universe already does. Or alternately, you could just quit, since that’s the way the universe works anyway.

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MatheMagician

Filed Under: Skepticality, Statistics, Stories, Videos by Reader Submission — Leave a comment
November 25, 2014

(Submitted by Skepticality listener and friend of the blog Christopher Brown.

Hi all:

My son, Ethan Brown performs a Mental Mathematics stage show. A few months ago, he developed a new piece for his act. It’s a version of an old presentation puzzle known as The Knight’s Tour.

Traditionally, performers have allowed audience volunteers to select a square on a Chessboard. The performer then begins on that square and theoretically moves a knight around the board using only legal knight moves (which are “L” shaped). The goal is to land on every single square on the board without landing on any square twice.

Ethan adds an additional twist to this trick by allowing the audience to also select the final square on which the knight must land, finishing the puzzle.

Since debuting this new trick, he has had a chance to perform it 5 times. 3 out of those five times, the two audience members selected the exact same two squares (only they were reversed in one of those times). Our back of the envelope calculations place the Mathematical odds at 1 in 107,374,182, though I suspect something else might be going on here. We have video of 2 of the performances if you’d like to see it. Could there be something psychological that causes people to gravitate to these squares much like people often pick “Ace of Spades” when asked to randomly think of a card?

I have attached photos of the three final Knight’s Tours. Note where the numbers 1 and 64 are.

KnightsTour1

KnightsTour2

KnightsTour3

Thanks! Let me know if you have any questions at all.

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 244.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog.

These notes are a bit dense for the podlet, but maybe you can use the story and just skip most of the math.

+++++

First, let’s assume that the choice of square is completely random in all cases.

We are not particularly interested in the odds that the audience would choose those squares because it’s not the squares themselves that are interesting. It’s the fact that the audience chose the same squares the second time Ethan performed the trick. Therefore, we are given the squares by the first audience and we want to calculate the probability that the second audience would choose those particular squares.

To calculate the odds of choosing those particular squares, we must first note the odds for each, which are pretty easy. The odds of choosing the first square are 1 in 64, or .015625. The odds of choosing the second square are 1 in 32 (since you are limited to only white squares and all white squares are available), or .03125. The odds of choosing both is:

.015625 x .03125 = .00048828125 or 1 in 2,000

1 in 2,000 is the probability that the audience will choose the same squares on the second round that it did on the first round.

The third instance is a bit different because, although the audience chose the same squares, the starting and ending squares are backwards. The calculation is partially the same, but if we allow either square to be the starting square, we are now asking a different question. We now want to know the probability of choosing that specific black square to start and white square to end, or that particular white square to start and black square to end. So, we start with the probability of each scenario, which we know to be about 1 in 2,000, then double it (it is not possible to choose both, so there is no joint probability to subtract). So, the probability of choosing either the same squares or the same squares in reverse on any subsequent game is about .00098 or about 1 in 1,000.

Since each time Ethan performs this trick, there is about 1 in 1,000 chance that the audience will choose those same squares as start/end points, the probability that it would happen on the 3rd, 4th, or 5th time that he performed it is about 3 in 1,000, or .003.

So, taken as a whole, the probability of the audience repeating the first (exact) choices on the second performance and choosing the same squares on one of the three subsequent performances is about .0000015, or 1.5 in a million. So not quite one in a million…

But that is all assuming that the choices were random. I saw nothing in Ethan’s posture or delivery that would suggest any given square as a starting point. However, we do know that human beings don’t do anything at random. I doubt that anyone has conducted studies to determine which squares someone is likely to choose if they are in this particular situation, but I think it is fairly safe to say that they are at least twice as likely to choose squares in the middle of the board than on the edges. I would be interested to find out if that is true, but let’s assume that number is accurate.

That changes the entire game.

We could simply double the probability of choosing those same squares in the second performance, but that wouldn’t give us the whole picture. Now we have to consider the probability of choosing those squares in the first round, because it is no longer a uniform distribution.

If we consider that someone is twice as likely to choose a square that is not on the edge, the probability of choosing that particular square is now .02, or 1 in 50. Likewise, the probability of choosing an ending square that is not on the edge is about 1 in 25. So the probability of choosing those particular beginning and ending squares is:

.02 x .04 = .008 or 1 in 125.

And now the probability of choosing the same squares, with either as the starting square, is about 2 in 125.

And that makes the probability of this scenario about 1 in 31,250.

But I think it is worth noting that the probability of those two squares being chosen at any given performance is independent of the outcome of other performances. It ranges from 1 in 1,000 to 2 in 125, which isn’t exactly “crazy”. But if it keeps happening, I’m going to think seriously about setting up a betting pool.

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Road Rage!

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader Submission — 2 Comments
November 11, 2014

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Michael Farese.

I have less of a story and more of a question. My girlfriend is from New Jersey and has a very, um, animated personality. While driving, she often gives people certain gestures, honks, flashes headlights, etc.

I always tell her that she needs to be careful and that she shouldn’t do things like that because there are crazy people out there who might try to run her off the road (or worse) in a fit of road rage. She tells me that I’m being ridiculous and that she has a better chance of getting struck by lightning.

My question is: does she have a better chance of getting struck by lightning? Am I worrying about something that has only a negligible statistical chance of occurring?

Looking forward to some insight!

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 243.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog.

Hmmm…. Well, finding statistics about road rage is difficult, mostly because the definition of “road rage” is fuzzy. However, after looking at several different sources, I believe it’s safe to say that it seriously injures or kills around 1500 people in the U.S. per year, and that doesn’t include incidents in which only minor injuries or property damage are involved.

By contrast, the number of people who are injured by lightning in the U.S. each year is fewer than 300. On average, the number killed is 33.

Several websites echoed this sentiment written in About News:

“Statistics tell us that most all of us have been involved in an aggressive driving experience either as the victim or the aggressor at some point in our lives.”

Yet the lifetime chances of being struck by lightning at some point in one’s life are about 1 in 12,000. So I’d go with the author on this one.

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The Spooky Cab Ride

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader Submission — 1 Comment
October 28, 2014

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Celestia Ward

Greetings. I had a strange coincidental experience a couple of decades back that, unfortunately, wasn’t cute or funny. My odds-must-be-crazy story is actually kind of gruesome and not for the weak of heart. So if you don’t mind a change of pace from your typical stories, I’ll tell you mine.

Some years ago, in Baltimore, I worked part-time with a small crew of artists in the tourist district. There were maybe eight of us. After night shifts I would routinely take a cab home; as a young female, waiting for a bus late at night could feel a bit lonely and dangerous. I would walk across the street to the large hotel taxi stand and usually there would be one or two cabs waiting.

One Sunday night I hopped into the one waiting cab and the driver told me he had just gotten paged by one of his “regulars” and would need to go pick her up–but if I wanted to ride along he’d drop me off afterward for a reduced fare. I had never had a driver offer this before, but there were no other cabs at the stand and a cheaper ride sounded good to me. I was in no hurry.

This regular client was a nurse who was just getting off her ER shift at the major hospital in the city center. We chatted as we rode, and she described the victim of grisly crime that had come in the previous night. An eighty-year-old woman had been attacked by her adult son, who lived with her and had a history of mental illness. He had come home from a drinking binge, accused her of stealing his money, and beat her up–even cut into her lips and cheeks, the nurse said, convinced, in his psychotic state, that she was hiding money in her mouth.

The cab driver and I were horrified. She said that the police had this man in custody and were expecting to charge him with murder. The old woman was in very bad condition and not expected to recover.

The nurse was dropped off at her house, then the cab driver took me home at his promised discount, and I just assumed that would be the last I heard of that awful scenario, unless the local news was covering it.

I went to work the next night and saw a couple of coworkers with grim expressions on their faces. They told me that Joe (I am changing his name) wouldn’t be working with us anymore. I first assumed that he’d finally been fired–Joe was kind of a jerk, had some issues and drank too much. No one really liked Joe.

It hit me sideways when my coworkers told me he had been arrested–for killing his mother! Out of the whole city, out of all the times I had taken a cab, I had ended up in the one taxi cab that–unknown to me at the time–got me a firsthand account of a murder committed by a coworker.

Tell me, what are the odds??!

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 242.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog.

It’s hard to say what the odds are without more information. The population of Baltimore at the time would be helpful, but not entirely, since the odds are increased a great deal by geography–the proximity of Joe’s home to his work place and the hospital where his mother was taken are not coincidental. So, I can say that the odds are much higher than one might think, but it is still quite a coincidence, and similar to stories I have heard before (I even have a similar story myself).

It is a gruesome story, and that gruesomeness enhances the chill and eeriness of the coincidence.

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John’s New TV

Filed Under: Skepticality, Staff, Stories by Wendy Hughes — Leave a comment
October 14, 2014

(Submitted by TOMBC Team Member John Rael)

The day I went to my bank in order to get a personal loan, I came home, turned on my LCD TV (Westinghouse LVM-47W1), which I’ve owned for six years, and started seeing random ‘snowlike’ pixels on the screen. I turned it off in order to turn it on again… it would not turn on again.

I unplugged it and replugged it. Nothing. It was officially dead. Even though its standby light was on, and it kept making a slightly high pitched hum sound.

Keep in mind, without the loan I had just received (that very day), I would not have been able to afford another television until at least October. Anyways, I’m not sure how relevant any of that is to the coincidence, but there you go. Feel free to incorporate any info you happen to know about me personally (career, lifestyle, etc.). Also, feel free to ask me any questions.

Below are the extended notes for use in Skepticality Episode 241 provided Edward Clint.  Ed Clint produces the Skeptic Ink Network and writes about Evolutionary Psychology, critical thinking and more at his blog Incredulous. He is presently a bioanthropology graduate student at UCLA studying evolutionary psychology.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

TV used to be pejoratively called the “boob tube”, until computer monitors became the rightful heir to that meaning, partly because televisions used to be cathode ray tubes. The cathode tubes of our primitive low-def ancestors were electron guns firing away at the screen one pixel at a time. Today’s liquid crystal display (LCD) TV technology is much more reliable, having fewer moving parts, and no electron gun. Thanks to this tubal migration, today’s tube-less TVs can have a mean-time-between-failure of 100,000 hours. This means that, on average, if you watched 5 hours of TV a day, it would take 54 years for the device to fail. A bit less if you like Peter Jackson movies.

TV failure in general is pretty rare. Then again, John, you’re probably not an average user. I’m told you spend a large amount of time and energy on making and consuming videos for the internets and whatever other media outlets still exist. I assume that means you work with lots of footage of cats and people falling off of things. So maybe you really put that Westinghouse through its paces. Even if you used it 24/7, it would probably take 11 years to reach the statistical breaking point.

What’re the odds you’d just happen to be able to replace a broken set on the day it breaks? A fairer question is, how many different expensive things breaking that day could have seemed like a strange coincidence? I have not been to your house, John, but I know you don’t drive, and I will assume it is populated with a variety of large fancy cameras that aren’t compensating for anything, some high end editing equipment, and at least two fancy blenders with way more settings than anyone could possibly need. I’m not sure why I assume there’re blenders, it just feels right. The breakage or loss of any of these items on a given day still isn’t too likely, but the odds are more moderately unhinged than crazy, which seems about right for John Rael.

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That’s Textbook

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader Submission — Leave a comment
September 30, 2014

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Rich Catalano)

I am an English teacher in Japan. I have used a variety of ESL textbooks over the years, but this year caused a stir. Why?

In one of the stock images, I appear in the background. I checked, and this particular photograph was from Getty Images, a famous stock-image company. The setting is a museum, and it shows two people looking at an unseen piece. I am in the background, alone, looking at a different piece. It is obvious that I am not the focus of the photograph, so perhaps I was captured inadvertently.

I showed this photo to everyone who knows me, including my ever-doubting wife, and they all concur that the image is me.

In the past, I went to Europe every summer with a group of students and always visited museums. Perhaps this is when the photo was taken.

Not sure if the odds are against this, but they seem to be.

Below are the extended notes for use in Skepticality Episode 240 provided Edward Clint.  Clint produces the Skeptic Ink Network and writes about Evolutionary Psychology, critical thinking and more at his blog Incredulous. He is presently a bioanthropology graduate student at UCLA studying evolutionary psychology.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

Rarely can someone say that they have a “background in teaching ESL” and mean it so literally. The odds must be astronomical. No, probably worse than that, because the odds of liking astronomy are pretty good. Who doesn’t want to tool around the universe in a giant chrome leech with Neil deGrasse Tyson? When scientifically analyzing likelihood in questions such as this, we separate the larger question into two smaller ones termed the “boring part” and the “interesting part”. It’s a Bayesian method. Probably. Anyway, the comparatively boring part is how likely is it you’d wind up in a stock photo in the Getty Images library? Or, not just Getty but any similar image supplier? For a world-trotting agorafile like you, maybe not as bad as you think. The top eight such services have a combined 155 million images. There is a constant demand for new images, and every day thousands of these get sold to hundreds of clients from cable news networks to product catalogs. Not all of those 155 million images are photos of people, but your odds of being in there are higher if you are a in a labcoat holding a clipboard, like to stand in front of a lot of sunsets, or, in this case, were looking at one of those dumb Louvre statues that doesn’t even have arms.

The more interesting part is, what are the chances that image would find you once it was in the Getty bank, and in a textbook you’re teaching from? Unless you’ve been doing this job for 60 years, probably on the low side. On the other hand, our increasingly visual media-rich global culture might be making this sort of thing more common. Just two weeks ago The Nation website reported a math textbook in Thailand had to have its cover changed because the bespectacled professional woman center frame is Japanese adult cinema actress Mana Aoki. You and Ms. Aoki have something in common: your images might have been sold or used dozens or hundreds of times by now. Plus you’re both apparently highly recognizable by a small set of Japanese people. That’s a feather in your cap.

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