Category: Skepticality


The Ken Kesey Koincidence

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
October 22, 2013

(Submitted by friend of the blog Spencer Marks)

I was just finishing watching a movie with my son and as the credits were rolling, I got a text from a friend in Seattle. We engaged in a few back-and-forth messages, and to make a point about something, she told me to look up Ken Kesey, a name I had never heard before.

I turned to my laptop which was beside me, looked up Ken Kesey, and quickly found that he was the author of the book, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” My jaw almost dropped, as that was the movie I had just finished watching and whose credits were rolling!

My friend in Seattle could not have known that I had been watching that movie as I am in Los Angeles and there had been no conversation about it prior to that. Since the movie was made in 1975, and this story happened in August of 2013, it wasn’t like the movie was fresh on everyone’s minds!

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 217.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own sarcastic and hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog.

This coincidence is impossible to quantify for several reasons. Depending on how we frame the question, the probability of this occurring depends on the number of films one could have been watching at the time as well as the number of authors the friend could have mentioned.

However, there are things to take note of in this story. One bit that we often fail to consider when something like this happens is that the the author’s friend clearly knows the author well. She suspected that the author would enjoy Ken Kesey’s work and, apparently, she was right! That part is not a coincidence, but the timing surely is.

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Hit or Miss

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
August 27, 2013

(Submitted by reader Alex Murdoch)

I got home from work today and was getting ready to cook a stir fry for dinner for the family. There was lots of noise, so I decided to put on my MP3 player and catch up on some podcasts.

Turns out I was all caught up, so I switched over to music and put my player on shuffle. A few song later I was feeling pretty good and singing along at a good volume. The song I was belting out was “Too Much Time on My Hands” by Styx.

My wife comes in and taps me on the shoulder. I took my right earbud out and she says:”What are the odds of that?” She pointed to her tablet where she was listening to Slacker Radio: Classic Rock. You can probably guess what was playing…yup. Styx: Too Much Time on My Hands.

I’ve got just over 800 songs on my player. So…help me answer my wife: What are the odds of that?

Below are the extended notes provided by Ed Clint for use in Skepticality Episode 213.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own sarcastic and hilarious commentary.

Ironically, almost everyone can remember a version of this sort of “million to one” experience. Such as when someone picks up their phone to call someone only to have it ring by way of said someone or hearing your name called out in a waiting room to find out a second person with yours or a very similar name is also waiting. I once found a comment left on the Reddit social news website left by my brother. It was just one comment out of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands posted that day to hundreds of discussions, most of which I never look at, and of the ones that I do, I could only see a fraction of the individual comments. The operant psychological mechanism is a form of confirmation bias, the attributing of meaning to events that merely coincide. After all, how many times does anyone note failures of coincidence in their life? How do we even guess at the number of failed coincidences? How could we check? What are the odds?

One music player had 800 songs and the other was playing from a “classic rock” mix. We can’t be sure how many tracks were in rotation in the mix, or which were favored because that depends on the listener’s previous choices. For the sake of argument, let’s conservatively estimate the Styx track was one of 1200 that might be in regular rotation. This would meant that at any one time both people were listening to music (assuming the Slacker Radio listener had selected “Classic Rock”), the odds are 1 in just under a million. If the Slacker Radio listener only likes “Classic Rock” occasionally, let’s say just 1/5 of the time she listens to music, the odds become closer to one in 5 million.

That sounds pretty unlikely, until you consider that none of the details have been specified in advance. In statistics, probability is the chance of a given outcome divided by the number of possible outcomes. So we can say the chance of a flipped coin landing on heads is .5 because there are two possible outcomes and heads is one of them. In our musical example: how can we decide what the meaning of “given outcome” or “possible outcomes” is? It’s cheating to decide after the fact, because the odds of any two songs playing simultaneously are equal to the odds of the same song playing on both sources. Instead, it is our intuitive psychology that defines what is meant by “unlikely hit” which casts the roles for expected and given outcomes.

Humans are pattern-seeking critters because nature rewards the pattern seekers: weather, climate, animal migration, and the co-location of flowers and bees with fruits and honey are all that dots it pays Darwinian dividends to be able to connect. The pattern sense necessarily registers false positives, connecting irrelevant dots. Now we can define the terms more clearly: the “given outcome” is any event that a person might experience that triggers the pattern recognizer and the “possible outcomes” are the set of events a person might experience which might trigger the pattern recognizer, but happens not to.

On the day the same songs played, the two people might have ordered the same improbable lunch, been humming the same theme to a beloved 80’s TV show, or stumbled on the same obscure internet article. If these events coincided, they’d each trigger the “what are the odds?” pattern recognizer sense. How many other potential “one in 5 million”-ish events might have happened but didn’t? This is difficult to guess, but I suspect hundreds or more, multiplied by any two people that may interact. When multiplied by 365 days, the odds get decidedly saner.

For the sake of argument, let’s restrict our consideration to musical coincidence. One in five million is steep, but then we only heard from this person and not one of the other 115 million households in the US (assuming this person is American). If our rough estimate is correct, the odds are that 23 other pairs of people have the same experience on days they feel like playing some tunes.

Edward Clint co-created the Skeptic Ink Network with John Loftus and writes about Evolutionary Psychology, critical thinking and more at his blog Incredulous. He is presently an intern at the JREF and a bioanthropology graduate student at UCLA studying evolutionary psychology.
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Dumplings and Data

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 2 Comments
July 2, 2013

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Richard Murray)

In 2011, my wife and I were finishing up final preparations to depart on a two week trip to China. The main part of the trip was thanks to a contest I’d won from the Royal Ontario Museum when they had the Terracotta Warriors travelling show.

Scheduling the trip was somewhat problematic, with blackout dates and weirdnesses around how the airline booked promotional tickets. In some ways, we weren’t even sure if we were going to be getting on a plane when we arrived at the airport that night. The plan was that we were going to Beijing, then Xi’an, and then Shanghai. Hopefully.

I wanted to finish up some work for my friend John’s web site before we left. Another friend, Tom, and I share a web server, and there was a problem that I wasn’t going to be able to address before we left. So, I sent a quick email to John and Tom, and asked Tom if he could take a look at things.

Me: “I took a look at the PHP upgrade, but had this fear of breaking things because it appeared to be installed non-standardy. I’m off to Asia in a couple hours, so… good luck :)”

Tom and I used to work together in Vancouver, on Canada’s West Coast. We’d go out to shows frequently when we lived out there. Since we had moved to Toronto, we haven’t really spoken much; he’s one of those people who’s not all that active on social media, so we only exchange the odd email now and again about tech things.

It wasn’t that unusual when I didn’t hear back from him right away, so we headed out for the airport.

A couple days later, and we were ending our time in Beijing. We had been through the Forbidden City and climbed the Great Wall. We also had plans to meet up with a friend from Vancouver who was now working in the Canadian embassy. She’d moved back to Beijing just in time for us to meet her there for a western style dinner at Blue Frog (in the light of an Apple Store.)

We knew that she might be in Beijing, so this isn’t really much of a coincidence, more just good timing. We said our goodbyes and found a cab and made our way back to the hotel after dinner, and that’s where things got weird. I found Tom had replied to my email from a couple days back.

Tom: “I am also in Asia (Xi’an to be exact) and have been for a couple weeks but I will do the upgrade next weekend.”

We were heading to the airport the following morning to fly to Xi’an.

Me: “Hah. We’re in Xi’an tomorrow afternoon.”

Tom and his partner had originally wanted to go to Turkey, but couldn’t find a decent rate, so they’d decided on something of a whim to go to Xi’an.

After being there for some weeks, he had had his phone off for the past couple days due to the sheer volume of SMS spam you get once you activate a Chinese SIM – it’s insane.

After days without using his phone, he turned it on, checked email, and found my message. He thought it was an amusing enough coincidence that I was headed to the same continent at roughly the same time.

We only had two nights in Xi’an, only one of which was free from plans,  this was a remarkably narrow window for us. We arrived, and toured the Terracotta Warrior dig site on our one full day there, as planned, and then we met Tom and his partner for dinner.

Over an amazing 20 course dumpling dinner at Da Fang Chang Dumpling Restaurant, we compared notes on China, and talked a bit about how weird things can just happen. Mostly, we focused on the dumplings… and then we wandered around the night markets looking for more food.

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 211.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own sarcastic and hilarious commentary.

I would like to say that the participants in this story may have gotten ideas from each other by talking about places that they would like to visit. I’d like to, but Xi’an? Still, seeing anyone we know when we are that far from home is always a bit of a shock. The fact that he had just emailed this friend/coworker is not so impressive; how many other people had he emailed shortly before leaving on the trip?

Also, unlike many of the travel stories we receive, this was not a chance meeting. It was merely a coincidence that they were in the same city at the same time. This actually happens to me quite often. In fact, I discovered yesterday that a friend and will be vacationing in the same place at the same time next month. A few years ago, a coworker took a cruise on the same ship as my family just a week before our trip; they were getting off as we were boarding.

The odds are certainly low, but I think what makes this story feel more shocking is the distance from home. 

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The Experimental, Coincidental, Accidental Lunch Shirt

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
June 18, 2013

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Ross Blocher, of Oh No, Ross and Carrie!)

Darrin, a friend of mine from work, suggested yesterday that we get lunch some time. I called today, apparently at the exact moment he’d just walked into his office after a late arrival. Wow! But that’s not the coincidence.

So we’re driving to a restaurant in his car, and I’m talking about the word “apophasis”, one of my favorite words – I’m not even going to tell you that it means bringing something up by claiming not to mention it. After giving a couple examples, I said the word always reminds me of one woman I know because she’s constantly referring to her positive attributes in the same sentence she’s claiming not to brag. She also happens to have been the subject of a paranormal demonstration. Paranormal?! That’s right, I’m a member of the Independent Investigations Group, and I won’t even mention that the IIG offers a $50,000 challenge to anyone who can demonstrate an ability that flies in the face of natural law.

This particular woman claimed she could see inside peoples’ bodies and detect a missing kidney. I was very much involved with the planning of the demonstration, but could not personally attend because I was vacationing in Europe. Darrin stopped me at this part of the story and said, “Wait. Do you mean…” and described the demonstration exactly. I was surprised. “Yeah, how do you know?” Darrin goes on to tell me that, before I even really knew him, he was one of the 18 people chosen to go on stage and be tested by this woman to see if his kidney was missing. While I was off on another continent, he was participating in the test I’d helped plan. If that was not amazing enough, he points to his shirt: “That’s actually where I got this shirt.” Lo and behold, Darrin is wearing the exact pale blue shirt that he’d received 3 1/2 years ago as part of the test – all participants had to wear the same loose-fitting blue shirt to minimize differences between them.

So not only was my co-worker, unbeknownst to me, involved in the event I’d helped plan, but I called to have lunch with him on a day he just happened to be wearing the shirt he’d received from the event. What are the odds? No seriously, you tell me.

Here’s a screen cap with Darrin in the blue shirt: 

 

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 210. Take a look and leave your comments below.

There is no way to calculate odds for something like this, but it is not as shocking as it seems. On the one hand, the author did not meet Darrin through a hobby or special interest group, but through work. On the other hand, if you’re having lunch with a coworker and calling them a “friend”, it’s highly likely that you share some interests and world views.

I am less impressed by the fact that Darrin participated in this demonstration than I am that neither Ross nor Darrin knew that the other was interested in skepticism. The social circles can be large, but there is a lot of activity on social networks. It seems to me that it would be difficult for these two to miss each other.

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Odds on Current Events

Filed Under: News, Skepticality by Reader submission — 1 Comment
June 4, 2013

(Based on a link submitted by reader Sean Duncan)

The Independent Investigations Group, which as you loyal, dedicated, and detail-oriented readers know is a Los Angeles, California-based organization that investigates claims of the paranormal and pseudoscience, is affiliated with The Odds Must Be Crazy and provides a lot of our support and backing.

The IIG regularly receives all sorts of communication regarding a wide variety of topics, including requests for advice on how to handle unusual situations related to the IIG’s fields of expertise. In this case, listener Sean Duncan decided to write in and get the IIG’s assistance with a subject he’d been discussing with a friend. Here is that email:

Hi,

My name is Sean and I live in Shelton, WA. I’m emailing because a skeptic of skepticism asked me about how, sometimes in disasters, thousands of people will die in a particular building yet one will survive for days or weeks because they are in the right place at the right time. I told this person that I would contact the Independent Investigations group because they like to calculate the odds of things. With so many people calling this phenemona a miracle, it might make for a good segment on The Odds Must Be Crazy. If you have the desire to calculate the odds of this Bangladesh woman surviving 17 days, we’d both appreciate it.

http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/11/bangladeshi-woman-rescued-after-17-days-how-people-survive-disasters/

Thanks,

Sean

Through this communication a long discussion thread was started to address the question and build a complete picture of what would be required to answer it. We found the results really interesting, and have decided to share some excerpts with you below:

Comment by Barbara Drescher:

There is absolutely no way to calculate the odds of such a thing; it would require knowing everything about the building at the time of the collapse as well as defining the context (e.g., the odds of surviving, given that one is in the building when it collapsed, or the odds of it collapsing right when one is standing in that spot?).

How I would respond to such a question would be to ask more questions. If it is a miracle that she survived, then what is it that the other 1100+ people died? How many people do you think survived for several days, but died before they were rescued? Would it be less of a miracle if it was 15 days or more of a miracle if it was 18 days?

This kind of thinking is flawed because it is “post hoc”, or after-the-fact. Given what we know happening, the odds of that happening are 100% (because it already happened). Even if we predicted that a survivor or two would be found this long after, it’s still not remarkable because it happens. People will always be “in the right place at the right time” and “in the wrong place at the wrong time”. When we think about all of the circumstances that must be “lined up” for such a thing to happen, it looks remarkable, but something has to happen. Some set of circumstances is going to be the set that occurs. Someone will eventually win the lottery.

I’m reminded of the research that Hugh Ross did in which he calculated an outrageous probability that the universe would produce human beings. It was so outrageous that he concluded that it must have been an act of God. However that kind of thinking is exactly like asking someone to pick a number between 1 and 600,000,000,000, then being shocked by the number they picked, given that the chances of them choosing that number were 1 in 600,000,000,000.

Comment by IIG Chairman Jim Underdown:

It reminds me of two related issues. The question is like asking what are the odds of surviving a car crash. It depends on the car, the speed, the driver, what it hit – and countless other factors.

The post hoc example I like is the paint bucket that fell off a ladder. What are the odds it would produce exactly that spatter pattern? … 100%!

Comment by Jerry Schwarz:

It may be important to emphasize the difference between the probability that a specific person will survive for that long and the probability that one out of the thousands of people in the building will survive.  I suspect that many people don’t understand that difference.

Comment by IIG Steering Member Dave Richards:

The kind of statistics I have a real problem with are ones where there’s a bimodal or multimodal aspect. For example if you plot the ages of death for 10,000 individuals on a histogram, it won’t be a nice bell curve – there’s going to be a big spike in infancy due to childhood diseases, another spike in middle age from heart attack and stroke because that’s when those usually happen, more spikes from various cancers for people that outlive the other stuff, and then finally a spike when the body just finally gives out from old age. To boil such a spiky graph down to a single average age for longevity is pretty much a useless statistic. But this kind of thing is done all the time in news articles.

Jim Underdown responds:

I guess I’m arguing that because each car crash (plane crash, building collapse) is unique, and survivability depends on lots of factors dependent on that particular crash, making general predictions (or assigning odds) about someone surviving any such incident would be beyond the amount of useful information you’d ever have access to in a random event like this. The odds you’d come up with in your car crash statistics might easily be useless unless you added in lots of other controls like speed, car make, alcohol, etc. A sober person who never drives a Mack truck more than 20 miles an hour will be well beyond the insurance company’s risk tables. (Sort of along the lines of shark attack risk for those who never go near water.)

The correspondent is interested in whether we can assign odds to her having survived. There’s quite a difference between calculating the odds that someone would survive, and that this particular woman would survive.

Barbara Drescher rounds up the strategy of developing probability: 

Starting with a very specific question is essential and without one, it’s not even possible to guestimate.

And I think that’s the disconnect that people have when they think of these kinds of occurrences as miraculous (I don’t think it’s relevant whether they consider it an act of God or just a really amazing coincidence). Post hoc thinking has the luxury of being vague, but it’s not the vagueness that makes it bad.” And following up: “I just don’t see how that’s relevant. The question isn’t about how statistics are used. It’s about whether an event is extraordinary, probabilistically speaking.

IIG Steering member Spencer Marks adds:

… the way I read the question about the odds didn’t seem (to me) strictly a question about the odds of surviving the collapse of the building, but of the survivor living for 17 days. That question of course is ALSO not a matter of “odds,” but of many different environmental factors such as the ambient temperature, perhaps humidity, his availability to water, his general condition before the collapse … Like Barbara said, this is not a matter of odds but purely biological and physiological science at work, and that should be mentioned!

Bay Area IIG member Leonard Tramiel summarizes: 

There is a very good reason that the odds here are different. It’s related to the reason that it is considered a “miracle”.

It happens rarely. We can state the odds of being in a car crash because this happens many times every day. Surviving a building collapse for more than two weeks … not so common.

Given the poor statistics, we are forced to consider computing the statistics and that is hopeless for either building collapse or car crash.

Overall we found this was a rather interesting (you can feel free to disagree with us without hurting our feelings) look into the thought processes that sometimes go into analyzing stories like this.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled stories. There will be further interruptions.

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Picture Perfect

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
May 21, 2013

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Dave R)

This story doesn’t involve me as a participant, however I witnessed the critical moment firsthand.

About one weekend a month the city of Huntington Beach, CA has a craft fair kind of thing at the Huntington Beach pier. People set up tents and sell artwork, candles, beads and jewelry, incense, etc.  Among the artwork, one technology that’s become popular recently is to take a photograph, blow it up and print it on canvas as if it was a painting. This is sometimes called a Giclée. Anyway, this past weekend I went to lunch with two friends that frequently surf at the HB pier, a popular local surfing spot. We decided to have lunch at a place we rarely go. To get to the place we had to make our way through this maze of crafts tents. Almost through the sea of tents, we came across a tent showing some of these photographic prints transferred onto canvas. One of the people I was with, Bryan suddenly did a double-take on one of the canvasses, and said it was him captured on the piece! Then the other guy with us, Eric also did a double take and said the canvas print right next to it was a photo of him!

By looking at the photos, both guys decided they must have been taken about 2 years prior. By this time the owner of the business noticed we were talking about these two pieces and came over to see what was going on. At first she was a little dubious that the guys standing there were the subjects in the photo, but finally was convinced. She said the photos had been taken by her husband. A few minutes later the photographer-husband showed up. Apparently he takes lots of pictures at the beach and doesn’t pay particular attention to who is in them or other details. Anyway our little group marveled at the amazing coincidence. It ended with the proprietor offering a free print of each surfer’s piece.

With regard to the statistics… very difficult to calculate for this. These two guys hang out together fairly often, but rarely go to eat at the particular place we were headed to that took us through the craft area — in fact I think this was a first. In working through the maze, we could have taken one of 3 different aisles through them — we likely never would have stumbled across the pieces if we took one of the other two routes. Also those pieces could have been hanging on the inside of the tent and we wouldn’t have seen them either. We only saw them because they were hanging on the outside of the tent, on the side facing where we were going. Out of only about a dozen pieces they had on display, those were the only two pieces that depicted surfers as subjects… the others were just of waves and other still lifes. The proprietor said she rarely displays those pieces, and just happened to choose to put up those two on that day.

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 208. Take a look and leave your comments below.

The odds are impossible to calculate, but a lot more likely than one might think. It’s interesting that the author focused on the odds that they would even see the prints, ignoring the incalculable odds that the two men would have been the subjects of someone’s photographs (I wonder if he reads the site a lot?). That must have been a highly unlikely event itself, except that these men probably spent quite as much time on that beach as the photographer did.

I don’t find the fact that the prints were chosen that day particularly interesting; it’s possible that the men passed by that tent many times in the past when the prints were not on display. And once they saw the prints, recognizing one’s self or close friend is very likely. Given that everyone in question lives in the area and frequents that beach, this just doesn’t seem like a “crazy odds” case.

What would make this story amazing is if the men were visiting from another part of the country and if the photos were taken on their last visit, 2 years prior. Then it would certainly be a crazy coincidence that the prints were on display that day!

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Irish Roots

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
May 7, 2013

(Submitted by reader Bobby Goldstein)

[EDITOR NOTE: Bobby requested that the names and dates of his grandfather’s name be anonymized for this post.]

I recently learned that because I have a couple of grandparents who were born in Ireland, I can get dual citizenship. This is pretty exciting to me, and so I’m doing the research and retrieving documents for folks who were born more than 100 years ago.

I knew my grandpa pretty well, and I knew his birthdate, and what county he was born in. The helpful woman at the consulate suggested I start by contacting the parish churches. So I started emailing parish churches in County Roscommon, and I got a hit. One church DID have a John O’Smith born on 1901-10-11. We emailed back and forth and they sent me a link to the government website where I could, and did, order a birth certificate. After I ordered it, I went back and looked at the emails from the church – they had a different birthdate for him, and I just hadn’t noticed – he was born JANUARY 11, not October 11. Everything else checked out, including BOTH parents’ first names.

I checked with some relatives, and they all thought it was plausible that either Grandpa had gotten his birthdate wrong somewhere along the lines, or that someone had mis-transcribed the birth month.

But then I heard from a different parish church in the same town, and they had a John O’Smith born in 1901 on OCTOBER 11. Also, on the second one, while the parents’ (i.e. my great grandparents’) first names were the same, they had a different birth name for my grandmother.

So I called the records office, and there were 2 people born with the name John O’Smith in 1901, and I’ve got the birth certificate for the wrong one.

Now, John O’Smith is not that rare a name, and while Athlone is not a huge city (population 20,000 now, I have no idea what it was in 1901), it’s not tiny, so that part of it seems like not that big a coincidence. But:

  • Both were born on the 11th of the month
  • They were the ONLY 2 John O’Smiths born that year in the county (I THINK they said the county. Might have been the town)
  • Both of them had a father named Patrick
  • Both of them had a mother named Brigid

I know that in cases like comparing Lincoln and Kennedy, you see so many coincidences because there are so many potential coincidences, and so you can cherry-pick. But, here, I can’t cherry pick. I only know so much about my grandfather’s birth. And yet just about everything (except birth month and mother’s maiden name) matches up.

How about that?

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 207. Take a look and leave your comments below.

This isn’t really as much like Lincoln/Kennedy as it is like most of the other name stories that we get. There is certainly some hindsight bias involved (in the Lincoln/Kennedy comparison, we notice the things that match and not the myriad of things which do not), but we should still be impressed with the number of things which are the same. Except that we shouldn’t.
I don’t have a good source of name frequencies in Ireland to quantify this, but being of Irish decent myself and having paid some attention to my own family tree, I can say that these names are indeed extremely common. What’s more, individuals born in the same year are much more likely to share a first name than those born apart because name popularity follows a trend. Some, like [John], Brigid, and Patrick are extremely common and timeless names most likely honoring a family member. Since the individuals share a last name, it is highly likely that they were related somehow, increasing the probability that the name would be shared.
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Way More Than a Dozen

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 2 Comments
April 23, 2013

(Submitted by reader Becky Glynn)

My husband and I live in Monterrey, Mexico, most of the time, not that has anything to do with the story – per se.

Two months ago, we bought an 18-pack of eggs from our local grocery store. Regular store with regular eggs, or so we thought. Over the years, I have cracked an egg and have been surprised to see two yolks, or even a little red spot. So, when I cracked the first egg from the carton and saw two yolks, I wasn’t as surprised as much as I was amused. Then I cracked a second egg and there were two yolks. OK, I thought, what are the odds of that happening? The third, fourth, and fifth eggs also had two yolks. Now I know the odds are getting larger.My husband wasn’t quite sure I was telling the truth, maybe miscounting? I had hardboiled three eggs to make tuna salad, so I had my husband stand there while I peeled and opened the eggs. Yep, two yolks in all three. We are now at 8 eggs with double yolks from a pack of 18. As it turned out, there were actually 14 out of the 18 eggs that had double yolks.

We are “guessing”  they all came from the same chicken, but really, what are the odds of having that many double yolked eggs?  We will wait to see what you all come up with.

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 206. Take a look and leave your comments below.

[This] story is more interesting, maybe because I can actually calculate the odds of this happening–with a caveat. First I’ll explain the odds, then the caveat.
I consulted several internet sources and found the information pretty consistent, so I think it’s reliable. The odds of a double-yolk are 1 in 1,000 (.001). So, if these eggs were randomly selected, the odds of getting at least one double-yolked egg in a carton of 18 are 18 in 1,000. Once one has been removed, the probability of at least one of the remaining eggs being double-yolked is .017, and so on. All told, if these eggs were randomly selected, the probability of at least 14 double-yolked eggs in a carton of 18 is .000000000000000000000000000267 (there are 27 zeros).
Now the caveat: because they all came from the same carton, it’s highly likely that they share some factors that matter, so the odds of a second egg being a double-yolker are actually dependent on whether the first is. Perhaps they all came from the same hen or they were from hens which were housed near each other and exposed to the same environment, food, and other treatments. What’s more, the hens that laid these eggs may be around the same age, and young hens are the ones that lay nearly all of the double-yolkers. So, the odds that an egg from a hen that is 20-28 weeks old is double-yolked are about 10 times greater than if the egg were chosen at random.
Because we don’t know the source of the eggs for certain, it is difficult to calculate the real odds in this case. It may be as much as 10 times greater than if the eggs were randomly selected. However, at .0000000000000000000000000267 (that’s 25 zeros) that’s still rather impressive, don’t you think?
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Check, Please!

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
April 9, 2013

(Submitted by reader Daniel Moyer)

In my youth I waited tables at a local diner. I worked the weekend early shifts, and referred to breakfast as the “meal of beverages.” There was always a huge variety of fluids (coffee, tea, milk, juice, water, etc…) at each table beyond the myriad assortment of breakfast foods. It happened one fateful day that I had two unrelated tables, both of them four tops.

As one could expect, each table had entirely different meals from the drinks down to the side orders. Eventually, table number one decided they were finished and ready to head out for their day, so digging through my pocketful of register checks, I handed them their bill, and they left, paying up at the register on their way out.

The second table remained active and decided they wanted additional food. When I went to add onto their check I realized to my dismay I had handed table number one the check for table number two, which was now closed out and paid for! I rushed up to the register to get the correct check to see how bad the situation was about to get for me. The hostess dug down through the cancelled checks to find the proper one and to our utter amazement, both bills were identical right down to the penny! Neither one of us could believe what we were seeing. With a great deal of relief and amazement, I explained the circumstance to table number two and showed them the proof, again, shock and awe.

I was able to add their additional food to table number one’s original check which they could now safely pay as easily as if the error had never occurred in the first place. The diner Gods were certainly smiling on me that day, and even though it’s hard to swallow, it’s the absolute truth and I enjoy recounting the story to this day. Is there any way to deduce these seriously crazy odds???

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 205. Take a look and leave your comments below.

Without knowing the possible combinations, it is extremely difficult to determine the odds of this happening. It might very well be high, especially if a number of items on the menu have the same price. Most restaurant pricing is a whole dollar amount with zero, $.50, or $.99 tacked on, but nothing in between. Furthermore, a diner’s breakfast menu is not likely to have items which vary a great deal in price and the per person total probably falls within a tight range most of the time. So, while I am sure that it felt shocking to the author, my guess is that the odds are not all that crazy.

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A Key Question

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 4 Comments
March 26, 2013

(Submitted by reader John Meuser)

I grew up on a farm in a rural community in Indiana.

The high school I went to had been consolidated from several small town schools in the area, so almost all students were bused in being picked up from houses which were widespread. Even though our house was only about 15 miles from the school, it took about an hour for the daily commute. Pretty much all students get their driver’s license as soon as possible so that they don’t have to go through this lengthy process every day.

My younger brother is mentally handicapped so was unable to get his license at the same time all of his friends did, but my parents didn’t want him to miss out, so they allowed him to drive an off-road utility vehicle, best described as a large golf-cart, to school every day. The brand was Cushman, but I have no idea of the model. He probably had a longer commute than if he rode the bus, but my brother loved the independence.

He also had problems with the combination padlocks on the lockers, so the school allowed him to use a padlock which takes a key. This is a very rural area where no one locks their doors, so the only two keys that my brother ever carried were the key to his locker and the key to his Cushman. He was unlocking his locker one morning, and realized that he had accidentally gotten the two keys mixed up, but was surprised to find that both keys were completely interchangeable. His Cushman key could unlock his locker and vice versa. What are the odds that the only two locks in the world that my brother needed to use took the exact same key?

Below would be the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 204. But as you may know from the podcast, the most Barbara could share is that she’s had a similar experience. This one’s just too tricky, and requires too much specialized knowledge, for her to assist.

So that’s where you, our faithful, generous, and brilliant readers/listeners come in. Do you know anything about the elements of this story that could help us solve this question? Are you, perhaps, a Cushman enthusiast? A locksmith? A trivia know-it-all who found a Cushman manual in a library and read it front to back in hopes that one day a Jeopardy answer would hang in the balance? Whatever the case, if you’ve got info, we want it. Please comment below the story and let us know what you think we need to know. There will be fame and fortune in it for you. Also, probably neither of those things.

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