Tag Archive: North Carolina


(Submitted by Skepticality listener Rob)

My first job after college sent me on a five-day training course in Boston, where I made fast friends with three other students. We were all traveling from different states (North Carolina, Nebraska, Michigan, & Missouri) and our ages ranged from 22 to mid 40s. Somehow we all hit it off in class and went to dinner every night before returning to our hotel.

Eight months later, I flew from NC to San Diego on a work conference. Checking into my hotel, I happened to bump into my Nebraska buddy hauling his luggage through the lobby. Amazed, we chatted for a few minutes, and I learned he was on a work trip of his own, unrelated to mine.

The next evening, I exited the elevator and passed none other than my Missouri friend, who was staying on my floor. He too was on a work trip, and after picking my jaw up from the carpet, I suggested we meet up with Nebraska guy and go out to dinner for old time’s sake. “What are the chances?” remained the theme of our conversation as we set off to find Mr. Nebraska.

Long story short, the three of us ended up at a seafood place, laughing, swapping stories, when suddenly our Michigan friend passed by our table, did a quadruple take, stared at us for a moment in silence, and burst out in laughter. Turned out he was a vendor at my conference, and was sent to demo a product that I would eventually take back to NC.

So, our impromptu gang had managed to assemble once again, from one coast to the other, from Massachusetts to California, eight months apart. I tell all my friends and dates this story, and none of them believe it. It’s certainly the most improbably bizarre event that’s ever happened to me, and I can’t even begin to calculate the odds.

You’d think I would’ve kept up with these guys, but honestly I never did. We never got together again after that fateful week in San Diego


Below are the extended notes provided by mathematician Brian Pasko for use in Skepticality Episode 263.  Brian is on the faculty at Eastern New Mexico University. His interests include scientific skepticism, popular science books and improbable coincidences that makes one wonder just what the fates are up to. Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

Cool! The Drake equation is named for physicist Frank Drake. It provides important considerations to estimate the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe. Finding the probability of you four friends meeting seems hard. Let’s analyze your situation with Drake as inspiration. The probability that you all meet as you described is the product of the probabilities that:

  1. You all happen to be in the same city (or, nearby) at the same time;
  2. three of you get the same hotel (and actually see each other!); and
  3. that the third person comes to the restaurant at which the others are eating (and actually see each other!).

This product is, let’s say, small. However, there are some interesting facets that affect this probability. The first is that I suspect you four are in the same industry. This may increase the likelihood of you all being in the same area at the same time. If this assumption is correct, you’re all likely in the same economic class as well. This narrows the selection of hotels you each choose and the restaurants you’re likely to patronize.

You could have met Michigan and Nebraska at the hotel instead of Missouri and Nebraska. So we need only that three of the four friends were at the same hotel. This increases the likelihood of a meeting by factor of three! Also, you could have seen any of the other two at any time during the day. In addition, you’re all on work trips and so probably are moving in and out of your rooms at the same times of the day, which increases the likelihood of a meeting.

Of course, the meet up could have happened in a lot of different ways. For example, two pairs of you could have met at two different hotels; or not at hotels at all but on the street getting the same cab; or at a pub after work hours… You get the idea.

A consequence of Drake’s ideas is that if we happened to find alien life in our solar system it would imply that the universe is positively rife with life! I suggest that if such a meet up happens again between you four, rather than lightening striking twice, it means that you’re often in the same place at the same time and just don’t see each other.

Dancing With Dragons

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Brian Hart)

I was at Atlanta’s annual Dragon*Con in 2011, waiting in a very long line with about two thousand fans to see a viewing of the latest Doctor Who episode, which had not yet been shown in the U.S.  Dragon*Con has an estimated 40-50 thousand people who attend for the Labor Day weekend.  For about an hour we waited as fans came walking past, dressed in various Science Fiction and Fantasy-based costumes.  Some of these costumes are very elaborate, and always in good fun.

I befriended the people I was standing next to; there were a few Amy Ponds, a Princess Leia, various incarnations of The Doctor, and a pretty woman in a belly dancer outfit.  The belly dancer turned out the be a real belly dance teacher, named Lisa, with a very interesting and memorable story of how she started dancing and teaching. The line finally went in and we all went our separate ways inside the theater.

Poster of Lisa, the Belly Dancer

Two days later, we were visiting Asheville, NC, and walking through the charming downtown area.  In the window of a store, I saw a poster for belly dance lessons.  The teacher?  The same woman I had met in line in Atlanta, 160 miles away, in a crowd of thousands.

[EDITOR: Pssh, wearing your work uniform as a costume is SO cheating. Reminds me of the time I auditioned for the role of a Blockbuster (remember those?) employee for an episode of Entourage. When I arrived it turned out to be what we call a cattle call (TONS of actors for one role), and several of them arrived in their ACTUAL Blockbuster uniforms. But the joke was on them in the end. – Jarrett]

Bunk or Buncombe?

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Brian Hart)

I was visiting Atlanta to do a panel discussion on education vs. debunking.  Prior to the panel, I started thinking about the word bunk and debunk and decided to find their original meanings.  A few minutes of Internet research told me that the word was derived from a region in North Carolina called Buncombe County.  A representative from that county in the 1820s named Felix Walker was known to ramble on with long and wearisome speeches for Buncombe.  In Washington, D.C.  the term, “you are full of Buncombe” became a common phrase.  Over the years the spelling changed to bunkum and the meaning morphed into “any kind of nonsense.”  I was able to bring this origin and meaning into the panel discussion that day.

Two days later, my wife and I drove to see her cousins in Asheville, North Carolina.  We arrived in the evening, and when I was talking about my panel and recounting the origin of Bunkum to the cousins, they all laughed and said, “Asheville is the seat of Buncombe County!”  The next day we walked over and took pictures of the courthouse, where the words  “Buncombe County Court House” are written in stone.

Brian Hart in front of the Bumcombe County Courthouse

Stranger from the Same Land

(Submitted by reader R Till)

About 10 years ago I was visiting New York City overnight with a friend. As we were walking down the street in Brooklyn a car pulled over and the driver asked for directions to such-and-such.

We said we didn’t know, we were just visiting from North Carolina. The driver said they were visiting from Cary, NC (a suburb outside Raleigh). I laughed and said that I lived in Cary, and he said he lived in the Preston subdivision. I told him that I lived in Preston’s “rival” subdivision at the time (suburbs are so weird like that haha).

I hope he found the place he was looking for…

[EDITOR: This is the sort of story you tend to hear a lot of, or variations of it. Certainly you get people who grew up together running into each other, but you also get stories of people from the same neighborhood, school, street, etc. who never met (sometimes separated by time, sometimes by pure chance) finding each other somewhere else. This one seems ripe for statistical analysis, as it’s clearly common enough, and when you consider populations, tourist destinations, transplant rates, etc., it’s definitely guaranteed to happen pretty darn regularly, which is exactly what we see here. But it’s still pretty jarring when you see it.

Years back I filmed a movie in Salt Lake City with Nick Cassavetes before he had stepped into (and nicely filled) his father’s directing shoes and was still acting. We spent a lot of time off-set together and when hometowns were discussed it turned out he had lived in mine when he was younger. We narrowed down the exact building in which he lived, which was directly next to the DMV. It was particularly infamous to me because during one of my lengthy visits to that lovely bastion of hope and cheeriness a crowd had formed by the window to watch as a man stood nude in his full-height living room window, displaying himself gleefully to everyone there. Thankfully Nick confirmed this was NOT when he lived there and he was definitely not the man in the window. But it’s a perfect example of those funny little hometown connections in a very unexpected place that lead to a great story.]