Tag Archive: Barbara Drescher


A Sad Coincidence

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May 17, 2016

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Erik Harris)

When I got home from work this evening and logged onto Facebook, I found out that a friend’s dog, Liam, died today. I had the pleasure of meeting Liam a handful of times, and he was a great dog. He really enriched the lives of many people, not just his own family.

Later in the evening, I found out that the father of another friend of mine died. His name? Liam. I never met this Liam, but his son has been a friend of mine for many years, and he’s someone that I have tremendous respect for, so I’m sure Liam was a great guy and a wonderful father.

I found out about both on Facebook, but both are people that I consider real friends, who I interact with in real life, and not Facebook acquaintances who I’ve only met a few times (or not at all). It’s not often that any of my friends lose a family member or a pet, and even more rare that two of my friends lose a loved one on the same day. I can’t say I recall that happening before, even including on-line only friends, though I’m sure it has. But for two friends to lose loved ones with the same name on the same day? As sad as a coincidence as this is, it’s also kind of amazing.

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 271.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society, and watch her on Virtual Skeptics.

At first glance this sounds like something for which we could calculate odds, and perhaps we could if we knew a few more things, such as the age for the gentleman who died. However, there are a lot of questions to consider. For example, although Liam is not a terribly common name, it can be short for more common names such as William. We also have no way to know how popular the name is for a pet, since there are no birth certificates for the vast majority of pets.

But there is an interesting aspect to this story in that the author found out about these events through Facebook, which has greatly increased the average user’s circle of friends as well as the probability that we will learn about such events in our friends’ lives. So, while it may seem as though tragedy is all around us at times, I think that such coincidences have probably always been common, but we are much more aware of them today as we are much more connected to others.

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The Dog Walking Coincidence

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April 12, 2016

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Brian Utterback)

My wife and I walk our dog every afternoon at nearby trails and parks. My dog loves snow so we often go places that have little traffic in the winter and may not see anyone else during the walk.

Recently we went on a trail and as we were coming back we saw another dog coming down toward us. My dog is small and does not get along well with other dogs so when that happens it is memorable because I usually have to grab him and pick him up until we can assess the situation with the other dog.

In this case the other dog was friendly and was soon followed by her owner who likewise was friendly, so I put my dog down and we all chatted for a few minutes before continuing on our way.

While we had been walking we noticed a trail that we had never been on before, so the next day we went back to the same reservation and went on this other trail, which turned out to be much longer than we anticipated. It met up with the previous trail near the end. So as we came to the exact same spot where we met the dog the day before, bounding down the trail was the same dog again! Since I couldn’t be sure at a distance I had to scoop up my dog again and we reenacted the same scene, in the same place. We chatted with the owner again and went on our way back to the car. What are the odds?

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 270.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society, and watch her on Virtual Skeptics.

The odds of meeting the same dog (with its owner) on the same trail are excellent.

People are creatures of habit, and returning to the same location to walk a dog is not surprising at all. While the second trail was new to the author, he notes that it connected to the trail they had been on the previous day, so it is likely that the other dog owner would choose it, either for the change of view or perhaps because she walks up via one trail and back via the other. The author does not mention the time of day, but I would bet that these events occurred around the same time of day.

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It Must Be Here Somewhere

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April 8, 2016

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Jeff Schwartz)

Skepticality listener and friend of the blog Jeff Schwartz  sent us a story describing his experience attending a Journey concert at a large complex with two friends. One of those friends, Michelle, had driven them all to the concert.

After the concert was over and the three friends left the stadium along with all of the other concertgoers, they realized that none of them had made a mental note of where they had parked the car. Jeff told us, “Michelle was getting seriously frustrated and was on the verge of tears.  At one point, after searching the parking lot for over an hour, she sat down on the hood of a car, slammed her hand down on it and sobbed, in a tearful voice, “I can’t find my car anywhere!  I’ll never find it!  I’ve looked everywhere”

“With that,” he said, “I looked at her full in the face and said, ‘Michelle, perhaps you should start by looking under your hand.’  Miraculously, the car she chose to have her temper tantrum on, was her own misplaced car.”

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 269.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society, and watch her on Virtual Skeptics.

This is, of course, not a miracle. I think most people have experienced the frustration of parking at a large venue and not remembering where. I have spent around an hour looking for my car on at least two occasions, so I can vouch for just how frustrating it can be. Cars also tend to look different at night, even when parking lots are lit, which aggravates the situation. Chances are actually very good that the group saw the car at least once and did not recognize it. So what are the chances that a frustrated driver collapses near their own car? Well, it depends on the number of cars in the lot at that time, which would be greatly reduced from an hour earlier. But another thing to consider is that this is one of those cases in which you find something in the last place you look.

A couple of nights ago I visited an emergency room to check an injury my son received in a high school lacrosse game and we witnessed a very, very frustrated woman throw a bit of a tantrum in the waiting room over a blanket she didn’t receive. She stated that she had been waiting for 5 hours, and while I have no way of knowing if that was true, it seemed like one of those crazy coincidences that her name was called 10 minutes after she gave up and left. However, it is not crazy. Her name was going to be called at some point, and the longer she stayed, the greater the chances were that it would be called shortly after she left. The same is true in this case — that they were bound to find her car eventually. The longer they looked, the more likely it would be found shortly after she became frustrated enough to express her emotions, especially since the longer they looked, the fewer cars there were in the lot.

So, while it is interesting that Michelle sat on a car that happened to be her own, especially without noticing, consider the keys you spent an hour looking for, only to find them in plain sight. Is it a crazy coincidence that they were where you found them?

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This is the Day

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March 8, 2016

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Cherry Teresa)

Last week, I was at physical therapy and they were playing an instrumental song during my session. I remember thinking that the accordion reminded me of a song from a commercial from several years ago. I really liked that song and hadn’t heard it since then, but I couldn’t remember the lyrics or which ad it was in, and humming into those song ID apps doesn’t seem to work for me, so I figured I may never be able to purchase that great song for myself.

After my PT session, I got in my car and had my XM Sirius radio playing. Only a few minutes into my drive, what do you know? The song came on! It was “This Is The Day” by The The. I listen to that station all the time and hadn’t heard it before, but they just so happened to play it the day I thought about it.

What are the odds? It’s definitely the same song I was thinking of and not just me believing it was due to the timing. I remembered the melody of the song, the singer’s voice, and the instrumentation. And the accordion. 🙂

To add to that, the song’s lyrics are “This is the day your life will surely change” so that made me even more excited about finding out the song title and artist.

Oh, and I found the ad it was in. M&Ms 2007.

Thanks!

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 268.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society, and watch her on Virtual Skeptics.

There is no way to know the odds of this happening without knowing how often the song is was played at the time. It is possible that the song was played often on that channel and just went unnoticed by the author, however, given that it’s not a Billboard hit, at least not in the U.S., I’d say the odds are pretty low.

If we knew how often the song was played, we could estimate the odds that the song would play at a specific point in time, giving us a better idea of the odds that she would hear it immediately following her physical therapy session.

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Another Geographical Coincidence

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January 20, 2016

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Peter)

We immigrated to Canada in 1981, settling in a small northern town, Fort St. John, British Columbia. There we met a person that my wife knew had been a friend of her Grandfather’s in the early 1930s in Germany, close to the town where she was born, and who had emigrated unbeknown to her sometime in the mid fifties to Canada, first moving to Vancouver Island and later to the same town where we finally settled. He and his wife became friends of ours. Now, that is not too crazy.

This year we decided to leave Canada and retire to the Azore Islands, where we met a friend of my sister’s – she has a house there and that is why we decided to move to the Azores – who lives close by, having had settled there coming from Germany in the mid eighties. He also coincidentally had been living previously close to the town where my wife was born.

On a visit with this gentleman this fall we met a German who hails from Berlin and now lives in Spain, a sailor who in the beginning of the eighties had sailed with his wife to Canada, where he stayed for half a year on Vancouver Island.

During the conversation when the sailor told us of his travels, he mentioned the name of our friend, that he had died two years previous and learned of that fact when he had visited Vancouver Island and tried to look him up.

He also told us that at the time when he came the first time to Vancouver Island he met the friend of my wife’s grandfather, a short while before that friend had decided to move north.

So on an island in the middle of the Atlantic we meet someone who knew someone who was a friend of ours who had lived several thousand kilometers away in the same town we once had lived in. What are the odds?

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 266.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society, and watch her on Virtual Skeptics.

One thing I noticed from this story is that everyone is German. This is not an irrelevant bit of information, since people tend to bond over things like sharing a country of origin, and immigrants also tend to cluster geographically.

So while the odds of this happening might be quite small, they aren’t as small as one might think. There’s a reason that the saying “It’s a small world” exists, and it’s not because the world is indeed small.

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A Canine Coincidence

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December 15, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener James Garrison)

A few years ago, I began working for OKC Animal Welfare. The day I was released to work in the kennels, I was helping a citizen look for her dog, and was trying to explain the process.

The shelter has 5 rooms for dogs, divided by age, size, if they’re adoptable or not, and if they’re involved in a case. I took her into the first room, which was normally reserved for dogs under 6 months, and I pulled the first cage card we came to and explained what she needed to do if she found her dog.

As I put the card back, she looked into the kennel, looked at me and said “That’s my dog!”, which turned out to be an older border collie looking dog, so it shouldn’t have been in that room in the first place, and it’s stray time was up. (Luckily, they were going to try and place it in the adoption program, otherwise she would never have found it.)

At the time, in 2007, the shelter took in around 35 to 38,000 animals a year (roughly half of them dogs), the shelter probably held around 200-300 dogs that day (that’s the general average) and the human population of Oklahoma City was 546,000.

As well, a large percent of the dogs in the shelter never made it to adoption due to various factors, including temperament, health, and space. Another consideration is that probably only 10% of loose dogs are reported or come into the shelter.

Given that roughly 100-300 people came into the shelter a day, and they get nearly as many animals a day, what are the odds of finding a specific person’s dog in the first kennel on my first day in the shelter?

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 265.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society, and watch her on Virtual Skeptics.

Only a few pieces of information are needed to estimate the odds the way the author framed the question, but the author does not provide the most important: the odds that a specific dog would end up in the shelter. However, let’s pretend that the 10% mentioned answers that question. If there is a 1 in 10 chance that a dog would end up in the shelter, then there is a 1 in 10 chance that any given visitor’s dog will be found there. We must assume that if the dog is at the shelter, the owner will find it. It’s just a matter of when. Since there are 5 kennels, then we can multiply that probability by 1/5th to find the probability that a person’s dog will be found in the first kennel. That makes it .02 or 1 in 50 that the owner will find their dog and find it in the first kennel. In other words, as the question is framed, the odds are not crazy at all.

The number of people visiting the shelter and the number of dogs housed in it are irrelevant. No owner would just sample the dogs; they would want to do an exhaustive search of the shelter to find their dog. Likewise, the population of the town is irrelevant.

 

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The Devil’s Footprints

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October 27, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Jim Fitzsimons)

Ok, here’s an excellent coincidence! This past Monday (Feb. 9) while at my day job, an old book of (mostly) urban legends came to my mind. The book was called ‘Strangely Enough’. I had blogged about it five years ago. I looked up the blog and reread it and in it I mentioned a favorite story in the book about the Devil’s Footprints which appeared overnight in England in 1855. It was claimed that the prints went in an unwaveringly straight line across several miles, over houses and haystacks, across rivers and lakes; all in one night.

Later that same Monday (Feb. 9), while at my night job, I was listening to the February 3rd episode of Skepticality. During the contributors’ segment at the beginning of the show, Tim Farley talked about those same Devil’s Footprints as part of his Skepticism, Past and Future.

Cool, no? Well, it gets even more coincidental!

Tim mentioned the date of the event. People woke up and discovered the uncanny prints in 1855 on the morning of February 9th.

That means I had thought of the book, looked up my blog piece on it, read about the Devil’s Footprints, and then, later, heard Tim talk about them all on the 160th anniversary of the event!

How crazy are those odds?

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 262.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society.

I can actually do a little bit of calculation with this.

At first glance it might seem that some of the odds in this case can be calculated. After all, we know how many days of the year there are. If the likelihood of the events occurring on a given day was the same as the likelihood that it would occur on any other day, then the odds of thinking about the Devil’s Footprints on its anniversary are approximately 1 in 365, or .0027. And the odds of hearing about it on that same day (given it’s the same year) are .0027 x .0027, or .000007.

However, there is a lot here that is nonrandom. For example, Tim Farley talked about the Devil’s Footprints as part of his Skeptical History segment precisely because the anniversary was that week. The probability that any given person would listen to the episode on February 9th is quite high–not easily calculated, but definitely much higher than 1 in 365. Furthermore, the probability that the Devil’s Footprints would come to mind is not the same for all days. Memories are activated by cues and cues come in all manner of form. Integral to the story of the Devil’s Footprints is snow and even if it is not snowing, cold weather may easily trigger a thought or two about the incident, especially to someone who has studied it. The date itself may have triggered the memory without the author’s awareness.

For these reasons, what appears to be a crazy coincidence probably isn’t all that crazy.

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London Encounter

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October 6, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Peg Gantz)

In 1996, my son and I flew from Glens Falls, N.Y., (via Albany, N.Y., and Newark, N.J.) to visit my daughter, a college student doing a semester abroad in Bath, England. We flew in to Heathrow and took a train to Bath. At the end of our visit, we spent a couple of nights in London.

The day before our visit there had been an IRA bombing on a London bus, so security was very tight. Because of a suspicious package, and announcement was made that the tube would not stop at our intended station of Covent Garden, so we got off at the stop before and started walking in what I hoped was the correct direction to Covent Garden.

As we stopped on a traffic island in the middle of a street, I asked a man who also was on the island if he could direct me to Covent Garden. “Sorry,” he drawled, “but I’m from Texas, and I’m lost, too.” We went our separate ways.

Two days later my son and I were in line at Gatwick airport. (Yes, we flew IN to Heathrow and OUT from Gatwick; no idea why, but the tickets were a gift from my brother, who’d used his frequent flyer miles, so I was not about to question it.) A man stood in line behind us, and it was the Texan we’d encountered on a traffic island somewhere near Covent Garden in London! We exchanged greetings, made note of the unusual coincidence, and again went our separate ways. (And in case you’re wondering, I never saw him again.)

I’ve often wondered what were the odds of lost U.S. citizens from different parts of the country meeting for the first time on a London traffic island, then encountering one another again in line at the airport.

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 261.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society.

Unfortunately, I have no answers for this one except to say that low-odds events must happen occasionally. This story actually reminds me of one of my own.

We (my husband, our two boys, and my parents) were flying from our home in Los Angeles to Vancouver the day before our ship sailed to Alaska. Our boys were (and still are) both constantly drawing and one of them was doing so while the plane was boarding. A man noticed, complimented our son’s work, and offered to draw something for him. In a few minutes my son had a personalized cartoon of Homer and Bart Simpson, drawn by a man who had worked as an artist and director for the show for many years.

The next day we saw the man and his family as we were boarding our cruise. He and his wife had two boys of their own, a bit younger than ours, and were booked on the same cruise and post-cruise activities. As you can imagine, we were able to spend some time together and became friends.

The odds are good that at least one family on a flight from LA to Vancouver is scheduled to board a cruise ship the next day, but the odds that two families who don’t know each other are scheduled to board the same ship AND interact are likely pretty small, although not nearly as small as running into someone in an airport that you saw on a traffic island days before in a highly populated city.

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Obscure Actor Twice in One Day

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July 21, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Vandy Beth Glenn)

Last Saturday afternoon, I was watching the TV show Fringe on Netflix streaming. In the guest-cast credits of the third-season episode, “Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep?,” I saw the name “Marcus Giamatti.” I’d never heard of him or seen the name, and wondered if he was related to Paul Giamatti, one of my favorite actors. So I looked him up on the IMDb and saw that they’re brothers. “Cool,” I thought, and that was that.

Later that same day I got on my treadmill for my daily run. I watch TV while I run, and this time I had a DVD from CSI Season 10, also provided by Netflix.

The next episode on this disc was “Lover’s Lanes.” The guest cast for this episode included, you guessed it: Marcus Giamatti.

What are the odds?

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 256.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society.

Once again it’s not a reasonable task to calculate these odds, but it is an opportunity to discuss what questions we should ask ourselves before getting too excited about the coincidence.

A look at IMDB tells us that Marcus Giamatti has a pretty long resume, but since many of the entries are guest spots on episodes of short-lived TV shows, we shouldn’t expect to see him when choosing something at random.

However, once we have paid attention to something, we are much more likely to notice the same thing or something similar or related afterward. This concept is called “priming”.

How many times has the author seen this actor in something and did not take note? Would she have noticed him in the episode of CSI if she had not looked him up earlier in the day? Had she seen this episode before and was not interested enough in who the actor was to look him up?

Also, how many times has the author seen an actor in two roles on the same day without noticing?

Another interesting question to consider: how much time would need to be between these two sightings to make the coincidence uninteresting (not a coincidence)? A day? A week?

Attention is really important when it comes noticing crazy odds.

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The Man in the Arena

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June 23, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener, Skeptic Society blogger and Junior Skeptic Editor, friend of the blog Daniel Loxton)

I spent much of last summer preparing my speech for The Amazing Meeting 2014, a large skeptics conference in Las Vegas. It was totally nerve-wracking. I’m shy. I get stage fright. I’d never given a solo talk of that length in front of such an enormous crowd—1200 people! Many of my intellectual heroes would be in the audience. And, I was planning a very emotional talk about beauty and joy and meaning.

So I spent five weeks writing and obsessively polishing that talk, titled “A Rare and Beautiful Thing.” Its themes were built on discussion of skeptics of previous generations, including magician Harry Houdini. I said this:

When Rinn’s old friend Houdini finally did get into the fight, he arrived as a mighty champion. He brought skill and knowledge, and wealth and fame. Houdini studied and investigated and wrote books, and gave demonstrations.

He went to Congress to fight for tougher laws against fraudulent fortunetellers, at least in the nation’s capital. He fought with passion, and gravity of purpose.

And he lost.

There is a strange and heartbreaking beauty in that.

As I worked to cram two thousand years of scientific skepticism into half an hour, I was forced to make cuts. One of the last things I cut, very reluctantly, was this abbreviated quote from Theodore Roosevelt, which had accompanied the Houdini passage:

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again…but who does actually strive to do the deeds…and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly…”

When I delivered the talk, the vast hall was silent. I had no clue whether the crowd was coming along with me. Then, as I finished the speech and stumbled off the stage in relief, I discovered that they had. Dozens of people rushed to talk to me. It was among the most amazing moments of my life.

One of those people was ‎a woman named Anna Maltese, who held a piece of paper in her hand. She wanted me to know that the talk had inspired her to share a favorite passage by her favorite American President. She felt sure I’d like it, so she had written it down for me. I looked at the paper. It said, “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust…”

I was stunned. It was the final surreal touch to an unforgettable day.

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 255.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog ICBS Everywhere, and Insight at Skeptics Society.

The quote is not obscure, but it is not exactly “Four score and seven years ago,” either. It is seen rarely enough to make this feel like a crazy coincidence. And perhaps it was an unlikely event, but there are a few factors which increase the odds quite a bit.

The first thing that we must always consider is that the commonalities we know about (e.g., the Amazing Meeting) are usually related to things we might not have considered–something called confounding variables. Anna’s attendance at the event was not random. The subject matter that brought speaker and audience member together is somewhat academic in nature and those interested in it tend, on average, to be more educated than average. The odds that someone in the audience would be familiar with such a quote are higher than the odds that any random person would. Even the odds that an audience member would count that quote among their favorites are higher.

But I think that the most credit for this incident must go to the simple fact Daniel’s speech communicated his message so clearly that the quote he wanted to use to illustrate it was brought to the mind of an audience member who was intimately familiar with it. That’s a brilliantly crafted and delivered speech.

(Please click here to watch Daniel Loxton’s address at The Amazing Meeting 2014.)

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