Tag Archive: Ed Clint


Checking the Check

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Paul)

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

(Submitted by TOMBC Team Member John Rael)

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Rich Catalano)

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

(Submitted by Friend of the Blog and Skepticality listener Brian Hart)

As my wife and I turned on the TV to watch the latest episode of Nurse Jackie on Showtime, it was randomly on another channel.  The movie it was showing at that time was the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and we switched over to Showtime.  The Nurse Jackie episode was called “Candyman”, and was about the death and funeral of the hospital’s news and candy vendor.  It featured the cast singing the song “Candy Man”.

Only one fly in this (chocolate?) ointment, that song only appeared on the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory back in 1971.  Who can possibly tie this coincidence together?

“The Candy Man can 
cause he mixes it with love 
and makes the world taste good”

Below are the extended notes for use in Skepticality Episode 237 provided Edward Clint.  Clint produces the Skeptic Ink Network and writes about Evolutionary Psychology, critical thinking and more at his blog Incredulous. He is presently a bioanthropology graduate student at UCLA studying evolutionary psychology.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

There might be more pop culture and media references to the beloved 1971 film than you realize. The classic Wonka film has had it’s fire rekindled after the advent of VHS home video, then with the DVD release, and again following the 2005 theatrical re-make (which does not include the song in question!) In fact besides Nurse Jackie, there are at least 17 different references, playings of the song, or parodies in recent media including films the Ice Age (2012 sequel), and TV shows including Futurama, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Gilmore Girls, and Malcolm in the Middle. The younger folks on the internet are also acutely aware of the Wonka image meme still widely used and circulated today.

Would it be considered a coincidence if you saw the movie playing after hearing a song by the band “Veruca Salt” on the radio or internet? The band is named after the rich, spoiled girl in the movie. How about when Wonka was quoted in the comedy classic Super Troopers? …The entire episode from The Office which revolved around Wonka’s “golden ticket” idea?

Still, Brian, the two references co-occurring and you just happening to see them seems pretty unlikely. Do you think it’s more unlikely than the runaway success of the film? A film about a creepy shut-in CEO using candy to lure a starving child into a “private tour” full of secret rooms, deadly machines, and fetish-geared pygmy slaves human-trafficked into his candy sweatshop? Maybe we’re better off not not knowing the odds, or what schnozzberries actually are.