Tag Archive: Mark Gouch


It’s a Small World After All

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 8 Comments
August 18, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener  Chris Benson.)

I have two similar-ish stories:

1. In the fall of 1979 my family moved from Muscatine, Iowa to Kingman, AZ. It was the week before Halloween of my senior year and I was leaving behind a graduating class of 379.

On my first or second day at my new High School, I was walking down the hall and found myself looking at an acquaintance from my old High School class! We were both surprised, to say the least.

2. In the early ’80s I was at Arizona State and a friend of mine from our dorm needed a ride to the University of Arizona for an ROTC function. I had a friend from Kingman whom I knew was at U of A, but we had not spoken for a couple of years, and I had no other information, but figured I could go try to hunt him down.

I dropped my dorm-mate off at his ROTC thing and went to the Student Union to see if I could look my other friend up in a school directory. The fellow at the service desk in the Union said he couldn’t help me because they didn’t have a directory.

I knew driving down that it was a wild goose chase, but I was really disappointed.

Then I turned around trying to think of something else to try, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t standing there. He was on his way to dinner at the Union’s cafeteria, and we spent a lovely evening together.

The population of that school was around 30,000 at the time, so I figure the odds were something close to that.

Below are the extended notes provided by contributing editor Mark Gouch for use in Skepticality Episode 258. Mark is a wastewater treatment system operator and engineer living in Smithtown, NY (Long Island). He started to become interested in coincidences after recognizing the series of events that conspired to get him employment on Long Island many years ago. Two of Mark’s recommended books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, and “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives” by Shankar Vedantam.

Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

1. This is probably impossible to estimate numerical odds. So many factors affect everything that happens. For example way back in 1979, what were the economics of Iowa and Arizona? In general there has been a movement of people in the US to the sun belt. If some specific economic or other conditions made making the move desirable, that would make the chances of meeting someone who made a similar move greater.

2. I’m glad that this story happened over 25 years ago. I did not notice at first that Chris said it was in the ’80s. I was about to criticize him for not doing a web search, or look for a friend on the face thing, or do an on-line criminal records search or something, to try to find his friend. But since it was a long time ago, he will be spared that criticism. If he should run into a similar situation in this decade, we know he will avail himself of the various internet tools to increase odds of success again.

We are sure that it must have been surprising to find his friend. Trying to estimate the odds of doing so is probably not really possible. But I think that as usual, there are some factors that make the odds much better than we might intuitively think at first. And it is worth thinking about them.

Let’s think about a few possible items. There may be a lot of odds reducers that he did not mention. For example, I suspect his friend lived in a campus dormitory and he happened, on purpose, or by chance, to go to the student union at dinner time.

I suspect that since it was a friend he was looking for, they may have gone to high school together. This means that his friend most likely lived in a dorm at the campus. If so, then it would actually have been a great plan to try to find a campus dormitory-living student by going to the student union cafeteria at dinnertime. Or breakfast time or lunch time.

Now if the population of the school was around 30,000 at the time, and half of the students lived in a dorm, then your odds of finding the person would roughly double. That would be about 1 in 15,000 chance, which is pretty long odds.

 

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Numbers Sometimes Lie

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
May 9, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener  Stephen Hayko.)

I do clerical work for a company that uses part numbers that are six digits long and begin with either a 5 or 6. When we order parts, our ordering system generates a purchase order (PO) that is six digits long and sequential.

We’ve been using this ordering system for about a year, and throughout the company, we typically place about 45-50 orders in the system every week, in my branch. We’re one of 25 branches in the US that uses this system, and we are one of the higher-volume branches – most other branches use about 30-35 orders per week.

In March, I placed an order for part number 649384. This is a relatively common piece and we typically sell 8-10 of this part per week – so it accounts for 16-20% of our orders. Lo and Behold! The PO was 649384.

Given that information, what are the odds that PO 649384 was attached to an order for part number 649384?

Thanks!

Below are the extended notes provided by contributing editor Mark Gouch for use in Skepticality Episode 253. Mark is a wastewater treatment system operator and engineer living in Smithtown, NY (Long Island). He started to become interested in coincidences after recognizing the series of events that conspired to get him employment on Long Island many years ago. Two of Mark’s recommended books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, and “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives” by Shankar Vedantam.

Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

This problem seemed very straightforward at first, but on closer review it seems that there is something interesting hidden in the details Steve provided. Estimating the total number of POs generated company-wide using the average of the ranges you gave comes to about 780 POs per week. That’s about 3,586 per month, and 43,030 annually. Steve said the numbers generated automatically are six digits long, and are sequential. So if 43,030 are generated annually, it would take 649,384 / 43,030 years to hit number 649384, or about 15 years, one month. So barring any large increase or decrease in business, in about 15 years you may see this happen again. But wait, Steve also stated that the company has been using this system for a year. Something is fishy here. If the numbers are sequential, and they’ve used this for a year, then they must not have started at 000 001. They must have started somewhere around 649,384 – 43,030 = 606,354. That is, if the numbers Steve gave were close to correct. Starting to wonder if this is some sort of trick question here Steve. Something does not add up. Literally.

So either Steve submitted a trick question which he knows is impossible, or someone, for some reason, decided to covertly tamper with the automatic PO number generating software to make it start at some number other than 000001. Perhaps someone thought PO numbers like 000001, 0000002, etc. would make the company look like a startup, or just would look odd. PO number 606354 makes the company look like they’ve been in business for a long time, and/or process quite a lot of POs. So this great mystery deserves some investigation. Inquisitive minds want to know what was the first PO number generated, who determined what that number was, how did they determine it, and why? And was it part of a conspiracy, or did this mysterious person act alone? A reasonably thorough investigation is certainly in order. There must be a logical explanation.

A number starting in 60 does not look like someone used their birthdate, which would be weird anyway. Does Steve know the last six digits of the CEO’s social security number? Well, there could be a mundane explanation, like the numbers were sequential for many years, maybe kept on a clipboard or something, and only a year ago was it computerized. Let’s go with that, and forget the conspiracy theory. In fact, everyone please forget all conspiracy “theories.”

So back to the actual question. It seems that Steve already knows the answer to his question. He said that this common part accounts for 16 to 20% of their orders. So the odds of any one order having this part number on it should be approximately……16 to 20%! Grab any random order out of the pile (or computer system) and there will be a 16-20% chance that it has this part number on it. That goes for any PO number: 650000, 700000, 131313, and also for 649384. Steve knew the answer; he just did not know that he knew. This is certainly not a criticism. It is better to not know that you know something than to think you know something that you do not. The fallacy was that he thought the odds would be different for that one special PO number, but they are not. The odds are the odds. The odds, in this case, are perfectly rational – but not sequential.

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Check Mate – You’re Dead

Filed Under: News, Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 4 Comments
April 7, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality personality and friend of the blog Bob Blaskiewicz.)

What are the odds? I mean, they must be CrAzY!!!!
Bob 🙂
Two players die at world chess event in Norway
Competitor dies in the middle of a match during Chess Olympiad in Norway and another is found dead in hotel room
By Esther Addley

The most prestigious international tournament in chess, at which the world’s top players compete alongside amateurs to win honours for their country, has ended on a sombre note after two players died suddenly within hours of each other, one while he was in the middle of a match. Hundreds of spectators attending the 41st Chess Olympiad in Tromsø, Norway, and countless others watching live TV coverage on Norway’s state broadcaster, reacted with shock after Kurt Meier, 67, a Swiss-born member of the Seychelles team, collapsed on Thursday afternoon, during his final match of the marathon two-week contest. Despite immediate medical attention at the scene he died later in hospital.Hours later, a player from Uzbekistan who has not yet been named was found dead in his hotel room in central Tromsø. Norwegian police and the event’s organisers said on Friday they were not treating the deaths as suspicious.

“We regard these as tragic but natural deaths,” said Jarle Heitmann, a spokesman for the Chess Olympiad. “When so many people are gathered for such a long time, these things can happen.

“The Olympiad involved 1,800 competitors from 174 countries, accompanied by more than 1,000 coaches, delegates and fans.

The event sees players compete in national teams over 11 rounds, often playing matches that last for up to six hours, and claims a worldwide online audience of tens of millions.

There were brief scenes of panic in the hall after Meier’s collapse, when spectators reportedly mistook a defibrillator for a weapon. Play was briefly suspended before his death was marked with a minute’s silence during the closing ceremony.

While the causes of the two men’s deaths are still unknown, they will raise questions about the mental and physical stress that tournaments place on players.

Meier is not the first player to die in the middle of a match; in 2000 Vladimir Bagirov, a Latvian grandmaster, had a fatal heart attack during a tournament in Finland, while in the same year, another Latvian, Aivars Gipslis, suffered a stroke while playing in Berlin from which he later died.

One of Australia’s leading players, Ian Rogers, retired abruptly from chess in 2007, saying he had been warned by his doctors that the stress of top-level competition was causing him serious health problems.

Tarjei J. Svensen, a reporter for chess24.com who attended the Olympiad, said the event had a reputation for heavy drinking. “There are two rest days during the competition, and particularly the night before the rest days there tends to be a lot of drinking,” he said.

A favourite attraction for delegates was the now-legendary “Bermuda party”, he added, hosted at each Olympiad by a member of the Bermudan delegation.

The Olympiad was big news in Norway, with the state broadcaster, NRK, carrying hours of live coverage each day, and the country’s government paying 87m kroner (£8.5m) for the privilege of hosting the event.

Last week the women’s team from Burundi were disqualified after failing to show up for their round six and seven matches; they remain unaccounted for, Heitmann said on Friday.

“It has been an eventful Olympiad, certainly,” said Svensen.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Below are the extended notes provided by contributing editor Mark Gouch for use in Skepticality Episode 251. Mark is a wastewater treatment system operator and engineer living in Smithtown, NY (Long Island). He started to become interested in coincidences after recognizing the series of events that conspired to get him employment on Long Island many years ago. Two of Mark’s recommended books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, and “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives” by Shankar Vedantam.

Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

A sad story, and surely it must have been a shock to those involved in the chess tournament. Well, we do not have a lot of information about the cause of death of the two men, so that limits what we might say about the probability. The best we can do is a very general estimate of the odds of the death of any person out of a thousand random persons. According to the ECOLOGY Global Network ™ web site, as of 2011 the global daily death rate was about 151,600 deaths per day. And in round numbers world population is about 7.3 billion.

So it would seem we should estimate the odds of one person out of a thousand at any conference, or any group of a thousand people should be somewhere around 151,600/7,30,000,000  * 1000= 0.0215, or about 2.15%. The odds of two persons in the group dying would be 0.0215 * 0.0215=0.00046, or about 0.046%. I think most people like to think of odds in terms of per million. So 0.0046% odds is 46,200 per million. This means that for every million conferences, meetings, etc. that have about a thousand persons in attendance, there would be over 46,000 of those events.

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Accident Down Under

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
March 3, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener  Craig.)

Hi.

I have this story this is totally legit, happened to me a few months ago.

Basically one Sunday night we heard a big crash out the front of our house. Turns out a car had crashed through our neighbour and my front fence with three young occupants (2 males, 1 female). The police came and took the relevant details and while getting names we realised the driver lived right next door to my sister, who lives two suburbs away (Melbourne, Australia). She always said they were dodgy neighbours!

Then when the my neighbours daughter in law came around to see if everything was fine she realised that she knew the female occupant of the car (who then begged not to tell her parents). Her sister was the god mother of the girl.

So it was to co-incidents in the one crash. The odd’s must be crazy!

Regards

Craig

Below are the extended notes provided by contributing editor Mark Gouch for use in Skepticality Episode 249. Mark is a wastewater treatment system operator and engineer living in Smithtown, NY (Long Island). He started to become interested in coincidences after recognizing the series of events that conspired to get him employment on Long Island many years ago. Two of Mark’s recommended books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, and “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives” by Shankar Vedantam.

Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

There is an old adage that says most car accidents happen close to home. We’ve all heard this, and it seems reasonable that since we drive to and from our homes quite often, that we probably spend a lot more time driving near our home than far away, so we would expect to have more accidents close to home.

According to DrivingToday web site , this kind of data is surprisingly not typically gathered by law enforcement or insurance companies, but the Progressive Insurance company completed a survey in 2001 to try to find out. (Gather a decent amount of data, analyze the data, and learn something. What a progressive thing to do! )

According to the site, they gathered information from people who were involved in 11,000 accidents, and found 52 % occurred within 5 miles of home and 77% within 15 miles. (Isn’t it nice when actual statistics confirm what we thought we already knew? This seems to be not usually the case. So much of what people think is true turns out not to be true when researched objectively. But that is another story).

Craig said his sister lived two suburbs away. Suburbs is not a standard unit of distance in the U.S., so we are not sure how far that is. It’s probably safe to assume the distance is 15 miles or less. If so, then the person driving had really good odds of having an accident within a radius that includes his house.

So the fact that the driver lived only two towns away has to be considered as unremarkable. Or actually: pretty likely. It would be highly unlikely for a person who lives in Canada or Argentina to have crashed into your yard.

Your neighbor’s daughter-in-law knows one of the people in the car. So let’s restate this: Not your neighbor, not his child, but the child’s spouse knew someone in the car. So the acquaintance had three “degrees of separation”, so to speak, half way to Kevin Bacon (not sure if your part of the world will get that reference).

It seems that this coincidence should be calculated by the number of acquaintances that your neighbor’s family has compared to the number of people living in the greater Melbourne area. The number of acquaintances that people have on average has been estimated by various methods to be in a wide range of between 150 and 300.

A very cool teenage acquaintance I asked said 1,500 minimum, in this, the social media age. But I think that is high. According to Robin Dunbar on the Social Science Space Web Site, a good estimate is 150. In this case we are talking about acquaintances of family members, who will have some overlap in the people they know, so let’s conservatively use 100.

So if your neighbor knows 100 people and each one of those 100 knows 100 people, then the total number of acquaintances of your neighbor and his acquaintances is 100 * 100 or 10,000. Assume your neighbors have two children, and both are married. So we have your neighbor and his wife, their two kids, and their two spouses, for a total of 6 people. Those 6 people should have about 60,000 acquaintances. Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge) indicates that about 4.5 million people live in the greater Melbourne area . So it seems that the odds of this coincidence would be about 60,000/4,500,000 or about 1.33 out of a hundred. That’s not all that low. (if we used 150 the odds come out to 3.0 out of a hundred.

  • http://www.drivingtoday.com/features/archive/crashes/index.html#axzz3SQw6YAQU
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
  • http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2013/11/robin-dunbar-on-dunbar-numbers
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne
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Clear as Glass

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
February 17, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener  Bill Walker.)

Hi, I am a contractor in New Jersey. I recently ordered 14 windows for a job. They only had 11 of the windows in stock so I agreed to accept the 11 and get the other 3 when they became available.

A few days later when the 11 windows were delivered to the jobsite I paid for them with my business credit card. They completed the transaction by having the driver call the home office and give them my credit card information. The driver gave the secretary the 6 digit total for the windows and then proceeded to give her my credit card number.

Business & Finance

As he was giving her the credit card number I heard her stop him before he finished so I asked what was wrong. It turns out that the first 6 numbers of my credit card were the exact same 6 numbers, in the same order, as the total for the delivery. She thought he was giving her the total again. And since my card grouped the first 4 numbers together there was even a space where the decimal in the total is located.

I would be interested in knowing what the odds of that happening might be. Even throwing aside the fact that I didn’t receive the complete delivery and that I chose to use that particular card it must be a very rare event.

Business & Finance

I have recounted this story to a few friends since it has happened and, to a man, the response has been “You should play those numbers”. (in the NJ Pick 6 Lottery)

When my wife suggested that to me I responded by saying that of course I should play those numbers because the same super natural force that had created the coincidence was surely going to exert it’s powers over the lottery for me too. I didn’t play the numbers.

It’s easy to see how someone who has a tendency to believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence and everything that happens has meaning would assign special significance to an event like this. And apparently even for people who seems completely rational their first response was to suggest that the numbers on my credit card and a receipt for some windows could somehow influence the outcome of a lottery.

Hopefully I won’t fall into that trap. Knock on wood.

Below are the extended notes provided by contributing editor Mark Gouch for use in Skepticality Episode 248. Mark is a wastewater treatment system operator and engineer living in Smithtown, NY (Long Island). He started to become interested in coincidences after recognizing the series of events that conspired to get him employment on Long Island many years ago. Two of Mark’s recommended books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, and “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives” by Shankar Vedantam.

Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

We’re sure it must have been at first a confusing, then a weird experience to realize that the sequence of numbers in your credit card matched the sequence of numbers in the cost for the windows. Determining the probability of this happening seems to be a pretty straightforward process. Bill also asked a few related questions that are interesting.

First of all, Bill did not mention the cost of the individual windows. Assuming they cost somewhere in the range of $120 to $500 each (based on a quick web search for single hung windows), the range of costs would be from $1,320 to $7,000. The low number in the range is estimated using the low range of cost of windows and only 11 being available. The high end of the range is estimated using the high range of the unit cost and assumes all 14 windows were available. Almost forgot this: If we assume NJ state tax of 6%, the maximum cost would be $7,420.00. This demonstrates that regardless of whether 11 or 14 windows were available, the cost would be less than $ 9,999.99, so the cost including pennies will contain six digits (Thousands, hundreds, tens, and dollars, and two decimal, or cents digits). Therefore, the fact that only 11 were available does not change anything in the probability estimate. Anything we determine is true for 11 windows available, will be true for the case of 14. We will still be talking about a series of 6 digits. Make sense?

So the question is what is the probability of a six digit series of numbers matching a different series of six digits. The possible range of six digits is 000000 to 999999. (Writing it as either digits with commas or using dollar figures makes it easier to see there are six digits). So there are one million possible sequences of numbers of six digits. And the odds would be 1 in 1,000,000, one in a million.

Now considering how many thousands of contractors there are, and how many pay for supplies in the same cost range with credit cards would be tough to estimate. But it is reasonable to expect that there are well over one million such purchases in the U.S. annually. So this probably happens at least once a year in the U.S., and probably much more often than that.

Bill mentioned the decimal point in the cost matched up to a space in the sequence of digits on the credit card. This seemed like an addition to the coincidence. He did not mention the lack of a space in the card sequence where the comma would be in the cost, which, if you consider a space in the place where the decimal was to be noteworthy, one would assume you would think that the lack of a space where the comma would be to be noteworthy also. This may be a case as Dr. Michael Shermer has pointed out many times that our brains “remember the hits and forget the misses.” But in general, we’re talking about a sequence of numbers, so let’s ignore the decimal point and comma. (Plus, in Europe they use decimals and commas in the opposite functions as we do, so thinking more globally, lets agree it is ok to ignore them.).

Now to the question of whether it is sound advice to suggest that based on this coincidence that it would be wise to purchase a lottery ticket with the same sequence of numbers. It would not. In probability these are referred to as independent events. What the sequence of numbers in a credit card number and/or an invoice amount are, will have absolutely no effect on the random numbers generated by a lottery ticket. The odds will be the same for your lottery number. But if that series of numbers were to win the lottery for you, you’d have a heck of a story to tell. It would still only be a coincidence, but a good story. So if you want to choose the same numbers for a lottery, do it for fun, but don’t do it expecting any advantage or disadvantage in your odds of winning the lottery.

Lastly, the question of whether some supernatural entity had an impact on the coincidence. Bill offered no evidence for the existence of, or the potential observed impact of a supernatural entity on the coincidence or any other event that has occurred in the real world. So it would be impossible to estimate the odds of that. We are skeptical enough to demand evidence.

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New Year Coincidence, 2015

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories, Videos by Reader submission — 4 Comments
January 20, 2015

(Submitted by Skepticality listener  Mark Gouch relayed to The Odds Must Be Crazy by Barbara Drescher.)

Here is the article (includes video) by Barry Wolf, WKYC.

Holiday & Seasonal

But how can we say this is unbelievable as they do in the article? Sorry, but I can’t help myself here…

The odds would be one out of 365 * 365 * 365, or about one out of 48.6 million births. With 7 billion people on the planet, odds are that this has probably happened about 143 times ( to living persons. many more to those in the past). So rare, fun, and interesting, but not unbelievable.

I believe it happened based on the evidence (their claim that it did, which is good enough).

Actually since everyone has to have a birthday, we can ignore the first birthday, that of the man or the woman. So the odds someone marries someone with the same birthday (date of the year) as them is 1/365.

Then the odds their baby has that same birthday would be 1/(365 * 365) or 1/133,225. So with ~7 billion people this probably happened 52,543 times to persons living on the planet now.

The error in the first calculation is that the date was selected first. That calculation is correct for any specific date, whether it is January 1st or July 4th, or March 15th, or July 22nd. Anyone with better knowlege of probability please correct me if any of the above is incorrect.

As often happens, things that seem unbelievable are quite believable and things that are believed without evidence are not believable.

Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 246.  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.

Good job!

You are correct with both calculations. It depends on how you frame it. If you’re wondering the odds of two people with the birthday of January 1st marrying and having a baby on January 1st, then the first is correct, but as you pointed out, that’s not really what’s interesting.

The only thing I would add is that these calculations also assume some things that we know are not true, such as that births are uniformly distributed across the days of the year. Even if natural births were (they aren’t), we’d see fewer births on days like January 1st simply because the number of scheduled C-sections and inductions is lower because it’s a holiday. However, figuring those few things in requires data that probably isn’t available.

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