Category: Skepticality


The Contract Coincidence

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
October 2, 2012

(Story submitted by reader David Buck)

I work on contract in the software development field and I specialize in Smalltalk programming – a relatively obscure programming language these days.  I normally have a full time contract but one day, my project leader told me that there would be a gap in the contract and it might be several weeks or months before they could get me back in.

I went into “find work” mode and thought about companies I’d done business with in the past.  I decided that I’d contact one insurance company first. I hadn’t heard from them since Nov 18, 2003 (some five years earlier).  The last I heard, they needed to do an upgrade and I thought that if they hadn’t done it yet, I might be able to help them out.

I frequently do this work under a subcontract for the Smalltalk vendor, so I decided to email my contact there – a fellow named Jim. On the morning of January 28, 2010, I emailed Jim to suggest that we contact the insurance company to see if they needed any work done.  I mentioned that I last heard from them in 2003.  Jim agrees and asks me to send him the email address of the contact person.  I don’t have that email address on my smart phone so I tell Jim that I’ll send it to him after I get home a few hours later.

Well, less than a few hours later (before I got home), I got an email out of the blue from the senior manager of the insurance company.  He wanted to know whether I still did that kind of work and whether I was available to do the upgrade work for them.  At no point did Jim or I communicate with them about this work.  They just sent the request on their own on the very day that we were planning to contact them.  I forwarded it to Jim and we started contract negotiations.

I ended up getting a contract with them for six months and successfully completed the upgrade for them.

So, what are the odds that in the three or four hours between Jim and I agreeing to email them and actually emailing them that they would email me instead after five years of no contact?  Weird.  The Law of Large Numbers works in mysterious ways.

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 192. Take a look and leave your comments below.

First, I have to question the reliability of the timing this author outlines, because his (assuming the author is male) numbers don’t add up. The timing is not particularly relevant, but it does demonstrate a possible fallibility of memory or documentation.

Setting that aside, it sounds a lot more unusual than it is. The author not only knew the manager and had worked for him in the past, but knew that he’d done a good enough job that the manager might be interested in working with him again. So, it’s not unusual at all that the manager would call the author when he had work to be done.

This leaves the probability that the manager would need to hire someone on the day the author needed to find work. That is difficult to determine without a good understanding of what was going on in the industry at that time. I think we can all agree that it is an interesting coincidence, but not a shocking one.

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The Hell Fire Club

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Mark Edward — Leave a comment
September 11, 2012

I’m a big fan of classic ghost stories and read at least a few pages from a book every night to help bring on sleep. I recently bought an excellent tome “Antique Dust” by Robert Westall. Without going into too many details, it’s a wonderfully bizarre short story collection about haunted British antiques in the style of the master of the antiquarian ghost story, M.R. James. For about ten days, I have been savoring a creepy little tale called “The Devil and Clocky Watson,” about a haunted mantle clock with a sinister background.

In the meantime I have also been working steadily on my own collection of mini-tales, “An Absence of Moonlight” which concerns various supernatural goings on in my imagined transmundane family. Although I hadn’t thought about the legendary “Hell Fire Club” of 18th century London for many years, my interest in it had been piqued during research for a section I was writing about. I Googled and read the real details about the club’s ribald members and history including its evolution into a much darker enterprise and their chief leader in that incarnation: Sir Francis Dashwood. I was fascinated, having had only a brief faux introduction to the “Hell Fire” mythos from watching an old episode of the “The Avengers” television series entitled “A Touch of Brimstone,” which featured Emma Peel prancing about in an unforgettable black leather fetish outfit – complete with spiked collar.

Anyway, I went to work spending the afternoon weaving my newfound tidbits of sordid weirdness into my writing. That’s nothing special so far. Just a completely random direction my writing took from off the top of my head. Now it gets weirder. Forward to last night: The Clocky Watson story was progressing really well, with Clocky himself having several sensual encounters with a lady ghost who climbs into bed with him, clinging to him for reasons later revealed. I got near to the end of the story and saw the word about a place called “Wycombe,” momentarily reflecting while reading that that name suddenly “rang a bell” although I didn’t attach must significance to it alone. I kept reading. Later at the very end of the story, it turned out that the haunted clock was portrayed as a relic belonging to Sir Francis Dashwood which was prominently displayed in the Hell Fire Club’s Medmenham Abby caves in West Wycombe, UK during the 1750s. The very words I had read a few hours earlier in the day. I stopped reading, took off my glasses, and felt a delightful chill run down my spine.

For a few moments, my own bed seemed haunted by something weird and unexplainable. What are the odds these two instances of the obscure Hell Fire Club would come up in two spontaneously unrelated places in a seven hour stretch of time?

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 190. Take a look and leave your comments below.

The odds are excellent; there is nothing spontaneous, unrelated, or unexplainable in what happened here. The readings were chosen by one person and they were related in that the author was reading a ghost story and became interested in the location while doing research for a story about the supernatural. The connection may seem obscure, but it likely isn’t. What comes to mind when you read the words “ghost story”? Perhaps gas lanterns in the fog and horse-drawn carriages? Old mansions with giant staircases? Gathering places of London’s upper-crust sound like a great location for a ghost story or a component of one. The author was probably so surprised by the second incident simply because he had taken such an interest in the club’s history after not thinking about it for some time.

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Trio of Traveling Tales

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — Leave a comment
August 28, 2012

We’ve got a special three-story set for you guys this time. Enjoy. Or don’t. We’re not going to force you.

(Submitted by reader Tracy McFadin)

In 1972 I was driving along a major street in Dallas, TX. and saw two young girls, maybe 17 or 18, hitchhiking (a rather common sight in those days) and stopped to give them a ride.

They were headed to one of the girls’ homes, and said it wasn’t too far from where we were. Having grown up in that area of Dallas myself, I said “Well where is it, because I know this neighborhood?” But the one giving me directions didn’t really know the street names, so she just kept saying “Turn left here, now go a block…take a right” etc. etc.

Well, amazingly, where she ended up directing me to, was the house that I had grown up in for the first 10 years of my life! My family had moved from that house some 11 years earlier.

Of course I was completely blown away by the coincidence, and excitedly was telling them how I had once lived there, and how crazy that was, but they totally thought I was full of it, and that I was making up some wild tale to somehow impress them.

Maybe one of them will read this, and say “Hey! That was me! That is so amazing!” Of course, no one will believe her ; ) …But crazier things have been known to happen.

(Submitted by reader Dave)

I grew up in Moses Lake, WA on the eastern desert side of the state. A couple blocks from us lived one of my best friends Adam. Our families were also close as his dad was our family doctor.

When I was about 5 years old Adam moved away out of state, and shortly after my dad got a job in state government and we moved to the capital Olympia on the other side of the state. Several years later we moved into a new house and I started going to a new school. When I entered my new fifth grade class I recognized a kid but I couldn’t place him. We found out we live a couple blocks away from each other so we started hanging out.

It wasn’t until our parents met and remembered each other that we found out that Adam and his family had settled in a new house the same distance from ours as our houses were back in Moses Lake!  What are the odds?

 (Submitted by reader R L Fletcher)

I was driving my grandchildren back home to Birmingham, AL after a week long visit at our home in a suburb of Dallas, TX.  About 200 miles into the 650 mile journey, we stopped at a Starbucks in Shreveport so the grandson and granddaughter could use the restroom and I could grab a cup of joe.

As we were walking back to my car, someone yelled out my grandson’s name. It was my wife’s brother and his wife! Unbeknownst to me they were driving from their home south of Dallas to Chattanooga, TN, and we just happened to cross paths at that Starbucks!

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 189. Take a look and leave your comments below.

I don’t find the first story remarkable at all, although I am sure it felt that way to the author. While a lot of houses fit in a reasonable radius for hitchhiking, they number in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands and the author probably frequented the area.
The second story is eerie, but it would be more impressive if the distance both families moved was much greater.
The third story seems less coincidental, given that there are a limited number of routes between major cities, but there is an additional element which makes it much less likely to occur: timing. A Starbucks pit stop is very short, so crossing paths there is indeed crazy odds.
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Coincidence or Conspiracy?

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 2 Comments
August 14, 2012

(Submitted by reader, Tamara Rousso)

Spring 2001 found us as members of a very liberal, free thinking, support-you-where-you’re-at kind of spiritual fellowship in Southern California.  We were new to the area and had made friends with a local family that homeschooled just as we did and also attended the fellowship.

The dad, Patrick, was a stay-at-home dad, I was a stay-at-home mom, our kids were close in age, and we found ourselves getting together for play dates quite often. Barbara, the mom, along with my husband, Mo, were in the trenches supporting our life style choice of a stay-at-home parent, and when we got together for family functions we all very much enjoyed each others company.

One day at the fellowship Barbara wished me a happy birthday.  I thanked her and she told me it was also Patrick’s birthday.  I didn’t give that much thought as it is not so uncommon to share a birthday with another person. A couple of weeks later found us at their home, along with Patrick’s father (his mother was deceased), having dinner. Patrick mentioned us sharing the same birthday, and asked what year I was born. I had always assumed Patrick was a few years older than I because he was completely gray. But, no, it turned out that he had grayed prematurely and was born the same year I was.

Then Patrick asked where I was born, to which I replied “Denver, Colorado.”  Patrick said “I was born in Denver, Colorado!”  Now it was getting a little weird. I grew up in Wyoming, and Patrick grew up overseas with a traveling engineer father. We had both ended up settling in Southern California, and here we were at the same table finding out that not only did we share the same birth date and birth year, but also the same birth city far away.

“What hospital were you born in?” was Patrick’s next question. “I don’t know,” I replied, “but I was adopted out of St. Joseph’s Orphanage”.  Patrick’s father piped up and said “I do remember an orphanage not far from the hospital”.  Chances are that we were born at the same hospital.

“What time were you born?” asked Patrick.  He continued, “I know I was born at 1:12pm because a friend did an astrology chart for me once and needed to know the time.”  I replied that I really didn’t know, but I thought it was in the evening.

Not too long after that I had reason to get my birth certificate out, and decided to check the time of birth.  (Insert the music from the Twilight Zone here.) Imagine my surprise to see that it stated 1:12pm!

That began the very long search to find some meaning to this bizarre series of coincidences.  Maybe Patrick’s mother had brought us together from the grave because we were twins separated at birth?  We were very similar in personality and, also shared certain physical characteristics.  I decided to search for a birth mother, and if I didn’t find one we would do DNA testing.

A few months later a birth mother was identified, but she was deceased.  Maybe it wasn’t true then.  Maybe she was just a shill for the Catholic Church, a cover if you will, so they could carry out a maniacal social engineering plot.  But a half-sister was found and while I look nothing like the birth family I do share many personality traits.

Okay, so if not a Catholic Church conspiracy maybe there is some truth to astrology the thinking went. Maybe that explains why we were so similar – not related but destined to be similar by virtue of our birth dates!

In the end we accepted the inevitable. Random coincidences that made for an interesting story.  But it does make one wonder – what are the odds?!

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 188. Take a look and leave your comments below.

The “cosmic twin” kind of coincidences in this story are reminiscent of the classic Kennedy/Lincoln connection. When human beings notice two or more things occurring together which appear to be related, we use a cognitive short cut and assume that they are related (illusory correlation). When we look for relationships, we tend to notice more, remember more, and assign more weight to the “hits” than the “misses” (the confirmation bias).

Discovering common features is easy – just look for them. This is how “data mining” reveals meaningless anomalies which scientists mistake for real relationships.

The best way to determine if an apparent relationship is meaningful is to develop a specific hypothesis and test it. In this situation, if the author suspected that the friend was a long-lost twin, DNA testing could be done. Otherwise, this is a set of interesting coincidences, some with crazy, but not unheard of odds, which were noticed only when the participants when looking for them. Imagine how many of these kinds of coincidences could be found if we took detailed inventories of all of our friends?

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TV – or Not TV

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — Leave a comment
July 31, 2012

(Submitted by reader Jason Pope)

I was in college in 2000 or 2001, living in a house with four friends.  We were in the basement one day watching TV as we would do more often that I care to admit. I had the remote control and, as I often did, I would flip through channels at a pretty good clip.  I would assess whether a show was interesting or not in a second or less before flipping to the next channel; a practice which infuriates many people (my wife/former room mate included).

Here is where the oddity occurs.  At one point I flipped past a channel when, for reasons unknown to me, I thought I had recognized actor Kyle MacLachlan talking to somebody. Before changing channels again, I said out loud to my friends, “Is that Twin Peaks?” referring to the TV or movie starring Kyle MacLachlan.

I immediately returned to that channel with the same rapidity as I had skipped it. As soon as I settled on that channel, the character portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan without hesitation said on screen, “Yes, it is” as if answering my previous question.

Though I know he was not talking to me, the fact that I had asked such a specific question, out loud, and immediately been answered correctly by the onscreen character from a strange TV show was bizarre. With that I turned the TV off and told my friends I was going to bed.

My own thought on this is that it chiefly suffers from confirmation bias or selective recall. I have probably flipped through thousands upon thousands of channels and asked myself the exact same type of questions. However, I only remember this occurrence because of the peculiar dialogue.  In addition, it sadly might also be a product of the law of large numbers, with dialogue that was not perfectly responsive being ignored or forgotten. Way too much TV.  🙁

[EDITOR: I’d vote for the Law of Large Numbers. Channel surfing is a direct result of the feeling that there are 57 channels, and there’s nothing on, to paraphrase The Boss. The sane response was to turn the thing off and get some sleep, or listen to a podcast, instead of believing it was possible to have a dialogue with the TV set  🙂 – Wendy]

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 187. Take a look and leave your comments below.

This a great story and I have to concur with the editor’s note by Wendy Hughes. It is more than simply a large number of channels available, although channel surfing is hard if you only have three. But if you surf through channels the way the author describes on a regular basis, you are bound to have an experience like this. I am actually surprised that the author does not have several stories just like it.

And as these things often do, it sparked a clear memory I have of a similar incident, so rather than a useless analysis, I’ll just add to the drama.

When I was in grade school, the teacher was reading to us for the first time. The story was a little bit creepy and she lowered her voice in a creepy manner to make it more dramatic. She read, “Slowly, the door creaked open and I heard footsteps approaching.”

Just then, the door to the classroom creaked open quite slowly and the principal tiptoed into the classroom.

I think we were all surprised that nobody screamed. The teacher was just as stunned as the rest of us and we had a great laugh about it afterward.

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“Put your mother on the phone.”

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
July 3, 2012

 

(Submitted by reader Bob LeDrew)

When I was a kid, I was at home one evening and the phone rang. I picked it up and said, “hello?”

“Hi! Is that Bob?”
“Yes.”
“Put your mother on the phone.”
“Can I tell her who’s calling?”
“Oh come on, Bob, stop messing around and put Evelyn on the phone.”

My mom’s name IS Evelyn. But I didn’t know the voice, and started to get a little creeped out by the presumption. We went back and forth, each of us getting irritated.

“Are you sure you’ve dialed the right number?”
“Is this 736-xxxx?”
“Yes.”
“Then put Evelyn on!”

I was flummoxed. This person wouldn’t say who they were. I didn’t recognize their voice. But they knew my name, my mother’s name, and had the right phone number?!

Somewhere in my brain, something made me ask “What area code did you dial?”
“702.”

?!!?!?!

We were in 902, the area code, for Nova Scotia, Canada. 702 is Las Vegas.

I explained this to the person on the other end of the line. She hung up, and I ran to tell my parents that somewhere in Nevada, there was someone with our phone number named Evelyn who had a son named Bob. CRAZY!

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 186. Take a look and leave your comments below.
I love it when I get to add to the craziness. I had this same conversation when I was a teenager, almost verbatim. My parents’ names are Bob and Carol (Yes, like “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice”) and my voice was very similar to my mother’s and people often mistook me for her. The caller asked for “Bob” and when I asked who they were they realized that I was not my mother and asked for “Carol”. I became suspicious and questioned them further; it turned out that they had dialed a wrong number and reached the wrong Bob and Carol. We had a good laugh and ended the call.
A year or two later, the same gentleman called and started with the usual small talk. I answered with the usual small talk answers, all the while trying to place the voice. At some point he realized that I was not Carol and asked my name, so I answered by asking his and we eventually realized what had happened. This kind of thing actually happened to my father a lot more than you might think. I recall a time when my father received some rather distressing phone calls and letters regarding the unpaid taxes of someone with his name who lived in our neighborhood!
So, let’s start with the not-so-unusual: I am not surprised at all that there is a common name in the submitted story and my own, since “Bob” is so common that it is used like “Joe” to imply a typical man. According to babycenter.com, “Robert” was the #1 name for baby boys for decades, was among the top 10 until 1990, and has not left the top 100 in more than a century. But let’s look at the probabilities within the original story itself.
The odds of two households having a mother and son with identical names and phone numbers which differ by a single digit depend on the commonality of the names and available phone numbers. With just a little bit more information, namely the year in which this occurred, and a LOT of research and computation, we could estimate this fairly accurately. Without that information, we can still make a few assumptions and cut a few corners to determine if the odds are indeed as crazy as they seem. Keep in mind that as I write this I do not know the identity of the story’s author and I will limit the source of some estimates to information about the U.S. for practical reasons, even though part of the story involves Canada (which complicates matters, but should not affect the outcome tremendously).
First we’ve established that “Bob” is extremely common, regardless of the ages of the mother and son. “Evelyn” has not been in the top 10 since 1915, but it was in the top 100 until 1953, then dropped in popularity somewhat until 2008, when it returned to the top 100.
If we assume the mother in this story was born when her names were rather popular, but recent enough for this to happen after area codes were in use, I will guess that this occurred in the 1980s. If 3 in 1000 (averaging and rounding) of the women in this age group are named Evelyn and 25 in 1000 boys 8-18 years old were named Robert, then the probability of a mother and son having the names Bob and Evelyn as opposed to any other configuration are approximately 15:100,000 or 3 in 40,000. Not extraordinarily low given that, according to infoplease.com, there were more than 62 million family households in the U.S. in 1985, so more than 4600 of them probably had mother/son combinations who answered to Bob and Evelyn. Less than 10% of households in 1985 did not have phones, so let’s say that there were 4200 Bob/Evelyns who could receive the call.
Where this gets much trickier is in estimating the probabilities related to the phone numbers. There were limits to the possible phone numbers at the time, making a calculation of the probability that two mother/son combinations named “Bob and Evelyn” would have numbers one digit apart a lot more work than I am willing to do for fun. However, we can get close to this by estimating the probability that someone would reach such a couple by dialing a 10-digit number incorrectly. In this case, what is more relevant than those limitations is the number of active phone lines. Tradingeconomics.com estimates the number of fixed and mobile telephone lines in the U.S. in 1985 at over 116 million. With 4200 of those including a Bob/Evelyn, that’s more than 1 in 25,000.
If you only dial one number incorrectly, the number of ways to dial 10 digits incorrectly is 100, but depending on which number you dialed incorrectly, the odds of reaching a person are actually small given that fewer than 1 in 50 of the possible combinations of 10 digits was in use at the time.
So, let’s assume (again, conservatively), that 2 of the numbers you could dial incorrectly would reached an actual phone. The odds, then, of reaching one of the 4200 Bob/Evelyns by dialing a single number incorrectly are about 7 in one million.
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God & Pizza in Vermont

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 4 Comments
June 19, 2012

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Alison Smith)

My friend Jeff Wagg and I both worked at the James Randi Educational Foundation for some time. We were close enough that we often had yelled debates over the phone – and the most popular conversation between us was about a higher power. Unlike many of my friends in the critical thinking world, I am not an atheist – though characterizing my form of belief is rather difficult.

One day, Jeff and I were winding down from one of these debates, and, tired of the argument, Jeff said, “I would believe in God if pizza showed up on my doorstep.” (I should add that he insists he said ‘a pizza’).

Immediately, I began to plan. Jeff lived in the middle of nowhere in Vermont. Pizza places didn’t deliver to him, and the nearest restaurant was something like half an hour away. I, at the time, lived in Texas – so I couldn’t shuttle a pizza over, either.

But we did have a mutual friend in New Hampshire – one that was driving over to visit Jeff soon – and she was the nice sort of person who would do a favor if asked. I called her and asked that, along the way, she stop off and get pizza to take to Jeff. I didn’t tell her the reason, or the source of the issue. I am not sure, even now, if she knew at the time that I wasn’t an atheist. She did agree to get the pizza, and I sat back, like a villain in a comic book, with a bit of maniacal laughter.

On the way to Jeff’s house, our friend stopped off to get the pizza and while there saw a greeting card she liked. She bought it, wrote in it, and added it to the pizza to take to Jeff. He opened it, and was amazed. So am I – even still.

The front of the card was the painting ‘The Creation of Adam’ – where God is reaching out to Adam, and Adam is reaching back. However, in this interpretation, their hands were not empty. God held out a pizza, and Adam held out money. On the inside, our friend wrote, “And God said, ‘Let there be pizza!'”

Jeff is still an atheist, though – because our friend didn’t get him ‘a pizza’, as he claims he said. She got slices.

Go figure.

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 185. Take a look and leave your comments below.

As cute, funny, and amazing as this story is, the ‘amazing’ part does not hold up to scrutiny. The author notes that arguments about the existence of God were common between he and Jeff. It’s likely that Jeff had discussions about religion with others as well. Given that the woman who visited Jeff is a mutual friend, the odds are pretty good that the friend was an atheist or at least enjoyed discussions about religion herself. When she saw the card, she knew that Jeff would appreciate that humor, and the fact that she was bringing him pizza made the card funnier, even though she did not know that the pizzahad anything to do with a discussion about God. This is a case in which shared interests and values are responsible for the friendships the three shared, making the odds of something like this happening much greater than they appear. Great story, but not ‘crazy’ odds. 

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Shirley You Can’t Be Serious

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
June 5, 2012

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

My extended family was enjoying its annual trip to Disneyland in late November of 2008. While we typically go to celebrate my mom’s birthday, this particular Saturday happened to fall on my niece Shirley’s third birthday. She was the delightful recipient of many gifts and happy birthday wishes. You could be forgiven for thinking that Shirley is something of an older-fashioned name; she was named after my grandmother.

We’d made dinner reservations at the Big Thunder Mountain BBQ. As we arrived there we heard a guitar-playing cowboy on the stage announce, “Come on up here, Shirley. Let’s all sing Happy Birthday to Shirley!”

Everyone in our party started looking at each other. “Who told him? How do they know it’s Shirley’s birthday?” As my brother-in-law walked Shirley toward the stage, we saw that another little girl was being escorted up in front of the crowd. Before my brother-in-law could say anything, another man yelled out from the crowd, “Our daughter is Shirley, too, and it’s HER birthday!”

Now we felt like we had to prove that OUR Shirley was really named Shirley and was also having her birthday, because the coincidence was simply too amazing! Here we had three girls, aged three, four, and five, each with a traditional name that is apparently all the rage, sharing the same birthday!

All three Shirleys were serenaded by the crowd. It took a long time for my family to stop laughing.

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 184. Take a look and leave your comments below. Please note that in the original version Ross sent us, the month and year were not included. Ross updated the story with more details after Barbara’s analysis and our recording.

When we are in the midst of these experiences, they seem astonishing, but there are a great many factors to consider when calculating the odds of such a thing. Although I cannot estimate those odds without some basic information such as the year in which this occurred, I think the list of factors will make it clear that the odds are greater than they appear.

  • How unusual was the name “Shirley” at the time? Although I concede that it sounds old fashioned, the popularity of baby names is an interesting animal with somewhat cyclical patterns. Sometimes a name is popular simply because it is widely assumed that it will be unpopular and people tend to seek uncommon names for their children. ‘Shirley’ is considered uncommon according to several databases that I consulted, including Babypedia, but it peaked at #2 in 1935. Naming children after great grandparents is a common practice; my own youngest’s middle name is Patrick, after my grandmother (Patricia).
  • How many girls born in the last decade or two had great grandmothers born during the name’s heyday?
  • How many people visited Disneyland that day?
  • How many young visitors to Disneyland that day were celebrating a birthday?
  • How many of the visitors were within earshot of the stage on which this occurred? Keep in mind that it was a popular park restaurant at dinnertime.

I imagine the park performers who do such things have many stories like this one. Still, it’s fun and memorable when it happens to you because, although the odds are not shockingly low, it is uncommon.

 

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Skepticality Episode 181

Filed Under: News, Skepticality by Jarrett Kaufman — Leave a comment
April 24, 2012

Hello Skepticality listeners!

If you’ve already enjoyed today’s episode of Skepticality, then you’ve heard our piece on Slow and Steady Stays at Home. If you haven’t, you should go do it now. We’ll wait.

Anyway, as we mentioned, a full breakdown of Barbara’s notes has been added to the bottom of the article, but as opposed to making you go through ALL the trouble of typing the name of the story into the search bar in the top corner (how many Ls are in “Steady” again?), we decided to just put an easy link on the front page right here. And here. There was also one earlier in the paragraph if you missed it. We’ll even toss one in here for good measure. Can you find the hidden one?

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Slow and Steady Stays at Home

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 2 Comments
February 25, 2012

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Spencer Marks)

A few years ago, I was driving home, and saw something moving in the middle of the street on the north end of the block that my house was on. When I got close enough, I realized it was a 12” California Desert Tortoise just walking down the middle of the street, in broad daylight, and in the middle of the city! Not wanting him (I knew it was male due to the “fighting fork” under his carapace) to get run over, I picked him up, and took him to my house. He seemed very comfortable around people, since when he would see someone approach, he would actually run toward the approaching person (well, as fast as a tortoise can run!), presumably to get fed. I figured he must have been hand-raised, since he had absolutely no fear of humans at all, and seemed to enjoy their company.

A month later, I was talking to a friend (one I didn’t talk to that often), about him coming to pick up some equipment from my house, and he asked for my address. As soon as I gave it to him, he said, “Oh wow … I grew up on that very street … just at the other end of the block from you!” We then talked a bit about who was in the neighborhood when he was growing up, and who still had a house there, and all of that sort of stuff, and for some reason he said, “I had a pet tortoise when I was a kid, and we couldn’t find it when we moved out, so I wonder if it is still at that house…”

I almost fell over! I told him that I had just found a tortoise in the street DIRECTLY in front of his old house the month before. He had moved away over 30 years prior to that, so I assumed it MUST have just been a different tortoise, but when he came to my house to pick up the equipment, he took one look at the tortoise, and said, “YEP! That’s him!”

I asked him if he wanted him back, and he said no, so today “Speedy” lives with me at my new house, with lots of places to roam, and spoiled with fruits and veggies by all who see him!

[EDITOR: We’ve all heard the crazy story of the dog or cat that manages to track their family ALL the way across the country to their new home (and seen plenty of movies about it, too). But it takes the brilliant staying power of a tortoise to stick around and wait 30 years for their family to return to them.]

Updated 4/23/2012

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 181. Take a look and leave your comments below.

In most of the stories of coincidence we share, the proximity, time-wise, of two incidents is short, but it’s hard to be shocked by it. Given the number of people with which Spencer was likely to interact in the weeks following finding the tortoise and the likelihood that some of those people lived in that neighborhood at some time in their lives, interacting with the tortoise’s previous owner is less unusual than it appears. The tortoise coming up in conversation is not that unusual, either. Any mention of where Spencer lived was bound to spark a conversation about the fact that the friend once lived there and that topic is likely to spark memories of the pet left behind.

If the tortoise was an adult when it was lost by the friend, the odds were pretty good that he would still be there 30 years later. The three biggest questions that spring to mind are:

  1. What is the probability that the tortoise would remain in that location for 30 years without intervention?
  2. What is the probability that the tortoise would have been moved (or taken in and cared for as Spencer did) by someone during those 30 years?
  3. What is the probability that the tortoise would still be alive after 30 years?

That the probability that the tortoise would remain in that location is high is fairly obvious to most people, I would think. It would take a tortoise most of day to travel even a mile, so tortoises tend
to maintain a rather small home range. Being removed by a new resident or other human requires being seen. Despite his size, which is not insignificant, the tortoise managed to be lost in the first place (assuming it was an adult at the time). The species is known for borrowing, so it is highly likely that he dug a hole under the house and spent much of his life there, undetected. Raccoons, larger and more active animals, thrive in urban areas and are rarely seen by their human neighbors. What’s more, the desert tortoise lies dormant during colder months, reducing the amount of time it is visible even more. I also wonder how many people would even know what to do if they saw a tortoise walking across the road. Unlike Spencer, I would not have known the species or sex of the animal, nor would I know whether it was safe to pick it up. I might simply try to hold traffic until it was safely across the road, then let it be.

If they survive to become adults, the lifespan of a tortoise is similar to that of a human, so 30 years is not unusual at all. The tortoise’s survival, therefore, relied on its ability to find food and avoid predators. Since their diet is mostly grasses, we are left with predators as the biggest danger. More specifically, ravens and coyotes (since gila monsters, badgers, and foxes are rare in this tortoise’s location). If, as I’ve assumed, the tortoise was an adult when it disappeared, it is fairly safe from these as well. Ravens will eat tortoise eggs and juveniles, but the shell of an adult is usually too much work when other food is more readily available. Although there might be some overlap in the daily cycle of the coyote (which tends to retreat to its den when the sun rises) and the desert tortoise (which is most active in the first half of the day), again, the tough adult shell makes a tortoise less desirable than other choices. In short, the chances of surviving 30 years on its own are excellent, assuming (again) that the tortoise was an adult when it was lost. It’s actually quite small if it was very young. Only 1 in 5 survives to adulthood in its natural habitat.

When we consider all of the factors, the one which brings the probability of this incident down the most is the temporal factor – the order and proximity of the events in time. It is certainly considerably lower than the average participant’s chances of winning a football pool at their office. Still, it is much greater than that of my next door neighbor winning the California lottery, yet that jackpot is won by someone’s next door neighbor dozens of times each year.

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