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Circling a Coincidence

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September 17, 2013

(Submitted by reader David Sauder.)

Last month I arranged with an old friend that our families would meet for a picnic lunch near Ampthill, about 80 kilometres north of London.

Aerial View of Millbrook Proving Ground

I am not all familiar with that area (I’m from Canada, and we are living in London temporarily).  I looked at the satellite view of Google maps to see what type of landscape we would be lunching in.  On the satellite view I could see a large nearby circle, which was about one kilometre in diameter.  This perfect circle looked like a road, and had smaller roads and roundabouts inside it.

I wondered what it was, so at the picnic I asked my friend. He didn’t know what it was. We tried to see it from the hilltop where we were eating, but couldn’t find it. I figured I’d do some more searching later to satisfy my curiosity and left it at that.

A couple of days later we left for a family vacation at Disney World, in Orlando.  One of the first rides we took was a “Test Track” ride at EPCOT.  This ride is a simulation of a vehicle test track. Before getting on board the vehicle, the next group of ‘drivers’ is brought into a large room where they stand and watch a video that explains what to expect during the ride. As the video was ending, and the lights in the room were fading to black, I noticed the picture hanging on the wall right behind me. It was an aerial photograph of my ‘mystery circle’. As the room went black, I had just enough time to read the label on the bottom of the picture, which said “Millbrook Proving Ground”.  When I got home, I looked it up and that’s exactly what that circle was.

[EDITOR:  Sometimes it’s fun to just read the coincidence story without any analysis. This one is a cutie. Submit your own coincidence story when you are visiting The Odds Must Be Crazy. Click on the Submit a Story link on our homepage! – Wendy]

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Pictures of Pugs!

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September 10, 2013

(Submitted by reader Jenny)

I work as a dogsitter part time, and for the past month, I’ve been taking two pugs, Tristan and Phinneas, to the Culver City dog park about twice a week.

Today I was browsing BuzzFeed articles and came across this one about excited dogs:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbellassai/animals-that-cannot-even-handle-it-right-now

I was scrolling through, and at #17 saw the picture of a pug playing with a corgi. The pug, his harness, and the background looked like Tristan at the dog park, so I zoomed in and saw that he had the same (distinctive) pattern on his collar as Tristan!

After seeing the collar, I was sure that the picture was of Tristan, but there are other people who take those pugs to the park, so I didn’t know if I had been there that day. I went to an email I had sent to their owner a few weeks ago and saw that the video I’d attached was of Tristan playing with that same corgi! You can even see the girl with the camera walk into it in the last few frames!

As a sub-coincidence, that same day at the park, Tristan was bitten by a pit bull puppy (he was fine), and a few days later when I went to turn in some paperwork into an office at my school, the form-acceptance girl recognized me as the one whose pug got attacked, and it turns out she was the corgi’s owner, and the one who took the picture I later saw on buzzfeed!

I see this as a quintuple coincidence, composed of the following occurrences:
– I randomly came across a photo on the internet of a dog I know.
– The photo was taken on one of the 9 times I was with him.
– I am able to verify having been there by having taped the same encounter between the dogs.
– The person who took the photo happens to appear in my one 9 second video.
– The photographer works at my school, though neither of us recognized each other at the time.

As far as numbers, there are usually about 30 dogs at the park. I’ve been there 9 times, and have only seen a couple of people or dogs I recognized from prior visits. I have only taken pictures/videos of the pugs twice, so my collection consists of two photos and two videos. Aside from the pugs, I sit for other pets about twice a month, but the pugs go to the dog park.

I am a student at the UCLA School of Dentistry, and my school only has about 400 students and a similarly-sized staff. The dog park is one of two within 20 minutes of UCLA (and is the further of the two). Unfortunately, no data yet on the number of dog photos or buzzfeed articles I encounter per day!

Below are notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher.   Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, visit Barbara’s blog.

Let’s address the items that the author is excited about:

“- I randomly came across a photo on the internet of a dog I know.”

The author did not come across this photo “randomly”. Buzzfeed is an extremely popular site. In fact, I’m not even sure that it’s a coincidence that I saw this very post just last week, even though it was posted in March and it is now September. It’s a hilarious post, by the way. I highly recommend clicking that link; you won’t be sorry!

It also stands to reason that many of the content providers for Buzzfeed live in the LA area, given that it remains a large market for those working in entertainment.

“- The photo was taken on one of the 9 times I was with him.”

This is a bit of a coincidence, but not as much as the author probably thinks. It feels personal because it happened to her, but someone had to have been walking that dog when its picture was taken and the author is a dog sitter.

“- I am able to verify having been there by having taped the same encounter between the dogs.
– The person who took the photo happens to appear in my one 9 second video.”

Although there is some coincidence here, there is also the fact that the dogs were acting in a matter that made two people pull out their cameras.  I know that if I’d seen that cuteness, I’d have been shooting it, too.

“- The photographer works at my school, though neither of us recognized each other at the time.”

Keeping in mind that geography accounts for a lot of what looks like random chance, this is still probably the most interesting coincidence on the list, statistically speaking.

[EDITOR:  I’m with Barb on this – dog lovers, click on that link! – Wendy]

 

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A Skeptic has Prophetic Dreams

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September 3, 2013

Kitty Mervine

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Kitty Mervine, of Yankee Skeptic.)

I really hate to share this with my skeptic friends. It sounds too far fetched. It should be noted, I never believed this was anything paranormal.  I had a dear friend Mary.  She was godmother to my 2 children. When our husbands were in the Navy, we ended up best friends. We were so close that when my daughter Evelyn was born, Mary was my Lamaze partner.  (My husband was out at sea for the birth.)  Through the years we kept in close touch.  Our families would visit.  It was with great happiness that we discovered we were both pregnant at the same time. Her daughter was born on Mother’s Day, and she joked my child would be born on Father’s Day. Sure enough (2 weeks overdue) my child was born on Father’s Day! Now, that would be weird coincidence enough. The odds of that are pretty far fetched. But we both just thought it was fun, and yet another bond between us.

Mary and infant Evelyn

Sadly, Mary was diagnosed with cancer a few years later. I didn’t worry too much as she had a form of cancer that was 90% curable. We all just assumed the 10% that died were elderly or weak in some way. For a young woman in her 30s that never smoked, was thin, and rarely drank, we assumed a cure of 100%. I made of point of staying in touch more than ever, because the treatment was really tough.

One Friday night I woke up at 2am and woke up my husband.  I told him, “l can’t sleep, I’m really worried about Mary.”  I’d never done this before.  He said he could see I was trembling. When he turned on a light, I was pale and simply crying out of control.  He calmed me down and reminded me she was still working full time and doing very well.  The next day I received a call that Mary was in the hospital.

She had contracted a cold and as a precaution went into the hospital; however, something had gone wrong.  Very wrong.  She was in a coma, and was most likely brain dead. Her husband was expecting to pull life support. It was totally out of the blue, more of a bad reaction to her treatment than the cancer. My own doctor later pointed out that odds mean nothing, at least not when you are in the 10%.  One of of ten that have this type of cancer will die. Mary died. I never could explain why I woke up in the middle of the night so scared.  But I also never attributed it to anything other than perhaps simply the stress of worrying over a friend and coincidence.  I was worried about her, but did not say or feel she was going to die.

My husband and I flew out to attend her funeral. It was probably the toughest thing I’d ever been through up to that point. Her three-year-old daughter didn’t get that mommy wasn’t going to respond to her cry for her to “Wake up!” at the viewing. The unfairness of life really washed over me. I couldn’t believe I had not only lost a dear friend; I had also lost the only person that shared memories with me about the birth of my first child.

In response to that desperation to keep her in my life, I dreamed about her almost every night. Finally, months later, when I felt myself recovering, I had a dream where she knocked on my front door. I answered it, and told her “Mary, you are going to have to leave me alone now.  I’m so sad when you come visit every night and I wake up and you are still dead.” In my dream she turned and walked away.  Sure enough, she has rarely since appeared in a dream. I know, rationally, that this was probably a way for me to slowly let go of my friend. Her death was so unexpected, I think I needed those months of dreams to adjust.  I never thought I was really communicating with her in my dreams. She was just in my thoughts so much during the months following her death, that it was perfectly natural she should inhabit my dreams for a bit.

About a year later,  I scared my husband when much the same thing happened again. His father was ill with lung cancer. He had been doing as well as one can with that illness. The cancer had not become any larger, and he had only recently stopped working. He was expected to do well for many months more. Once again  I woke up in the middle of the night quite upset. I was worried about his father.  Mark was “not again!” and got me back to sleep. That day, sure enough, we got a call his father has had a heart attack. His mother had a “do not resuscitate” order.  At this point my husband was looking at me really oddly.  I kept assuring him I was not paranormal. Certainly in his dad’s case there was much more reason for worry.

When my husband’s cousin, and my good friend, also became ill with cancer I was a bit nervous. Waking up in the middle of the night crying was not fun. I kept in close touch with her. I sent gifts, letters and books. One day I sent off a package with a dressy purse for her to take on a cruise through the Panama Canal. I got home from the post office to a phone call that my friend had died. While sad, there was also a sense of relief. I, of course, knew I had no special power to know when someone was going to die; but, three events would have been most uncomfortable.

Since then, others close to me have died. I have never again been even close to knowing when the end would come.  One thing that I found did keep me grounded during the two events was the thought that there was no purpose or good in my “knowing” when someone was about to die. When psychics make vague predictions, I’ve always said to the believers “But aren’t words from beyond that are so vague and general even worse than no word at all?” Why tell the police that a body is “in or near water”?  There are so many bodies of water, including bathtubs and pools, that it is as good as no help. Since my premonition or feeling about two deaths had no rhyme or reason, I choose to accept it as simply “one of those things”. Though I have to admit my husband still looks at me a little oddly at times, and not just when I serve “Sauerkraut Cake” (it’s good!) http://allrecipes.com/recipe/german-chocolate-sauerkraut-cake/

[EDITOR:  Kitty was remembered by James Randi in the keynote address of TAM 2013 for extraordinary service to the skepticism community. – Wendy]

 

 

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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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A Tale of a First TAMmer

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
August 6, 2013

(Submitted by reader Jim Preston)

I went to my first ever The Amazing Meeting this year, held at the Southpoint Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. It was not only my first TAM, it was my first skeptical meeting of any kind. When I arrived, I went to the front desk to check in. I asked if I could have a particularly quiet room, away from the ice machine and the elevator. That was the only input that I had into which room I would get. When the desk clerk told me my room number I was amazed that the four digits were the year I was born.

So what are the odds that I’d be given a room whose number is the year I was born? According to their website, the Southpoint has 2163 rooms. So the simple odds are one out of 2163. Now, if I was someone who travelled a lot and stayed in hotels with at least 19 floors a lot, I’d say that this was bound to happen sooner or later. But I almost never stay in a large hotel. I’ve probably stayed in a 19+ floor hotel less than a dozen times in my life. So the odds that one of those times I would get my birth year room is more like 12 out of whatever the average number of rooms in those dozen hotels is, probably something in the one to two thousand range. Still rather long odds.

What I find most interesting about this is how much, even though I was a good skeptic and I knew it was just a coincidence, I found myself wanting to believe that there was some kind of significance in getting my birth year as my room number at my first ever skeptical meeting.

But maybe it was just an opportunity to apply my skepticism. But see, I said “opportunity”; I’m still phrasing it in terms of some kind of meaning.

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 212.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own sarcastic and hilarious commentary.

The author of this story did an excellent analysis himself. Even if we only consider the question of the odds of getting a single, specific room number on this specific occasion, at one in 2163, it’s much, much greater than winning the jackpot on any of the slot machines.

But the one thing that is most important to keep in mind is that it’s post-hoc thinking to even consider these odds. What if the room number wasn’t the year of his birth, but the last four digits of his SSN or phone number? Or his street address at home? Our lives are filled with numbers that hold significance for us. The odds of getting a room number that matches some other number of significance are actually quite high–much higher than if we chose one beforehand and tried to predict the incident.
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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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