Tag Archive: six degrees of separation


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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Coincidences: Paranormal or Normal?

Filed Under: Editorials, Staff by Wendy Hughes — Leave a comment
December 31, 2011

Are coincidences spooky supernatural experiences, or just interesting accidents of timing and geography? I have noticed them all my life, but I’ve never tried to quantify or identify them in any organized way before.

It’s not too unusual to bump into friends in the neighborhood. I seemed to run into my friend Connie pretty regularly at the old garden shop that used to be in our neighborhood before it was razed a few years ago. Frequently, every couple of months, we see each other at the Gelson’s grocery at around five o’clock. My excuse is that I’d discover at the last minute that I was short one or two ingredients for dinner and have to zoom to the market on a mission. I was chugging along pushing my basket one time, and felt somebody’s hand in my pocket and screamed — it was Connie — she was sneaking up on me. A shopper who saw her thought she was trying to steal something from me, and laughed when we hugged each other.

But — is it less common to see friends on the freeway? There approximately 2,000 vehicles per hour (vph) per lane* in rush hour — cars full of strangers, and it seems unlikely that I would see anyone I recognize in one of the cars; but I have seen my daughter in her car on the 101 westbound, which is probably not too unusual because we live in the same neighborhood, except I didn’t know she was about to go out at the same time I was. One time I was on my way to work in the morning, and I was driving along from Studio City on the 134 eastbound toward Eagle Rock. I had the radio on, concentrating on not missing my off ramp, and didn’t notice right away that two guys in a truck next to me on the drivers’ side were yelling and waving “Hey Wendy!” They were my boyfriend’s nephew and godson on their way to a glass installation job, and they recognized me in my car on the freeway!

Another time, I was on the Hollywood freeway, 170 North, and the SUV in front of me had a familiar name stenciled on it, Sharp FX, our friend Nick’s special effects business, except Nick had been living in China for over a year. I called my boyfriend and told him I saw Nicky’s car, and that I think he’s back home.

I was resting on a bus bench with my friend Gilda when we were on a shopping trip along Melrose Avenue, a popular retail area. We were talking with each other, and enjoying peoplewatching. She was sitting turned toward me and I was facing the street, so I didn’t see the boys coming close when one of them leaned over the back of the bench to give me a hug and a kiss. It was my friend PJ… and I recognized him right away, but Gilda didn’t know him, and she thought he was trying to steal my purse.  It seemed normal at the time, but as I look back on it, I go back and forth. I think that these experiences of bumping into friends in public, both in stores, on the sidewalk away from your normal neighborhood, seeing friends on the freeways, are worth counting to see just how unusual, or usual, they are.

Our paths cross by accidents of timing and geography — the phone rings and it’s someone you were talking about five minutes ago — but does that mean it can help you predict the future? Does that mean putting on the shirt you were wearing when you fell in love will bring back your long lost sweetheart? I can understand the surprising nature of unlikely circumstance — bumping into an old friend in a public place, or just noticing the wacky juxtaposition of a pattern of events that seem at once connected, and yet unrelated. Some people seem to have friends everywhere –  can they be the hubs of the six degrees of separation — the people who can hand off a package, and through a series of only single friend-to-friend transitions, transmit it from New York City to a jungle settlement in Zaire? I believe it’s true. There are people who know more than the usual number of other people, and people who nurture loose friendships that are the fiber of such human networks as these seeming coincidences are made of.

But I also understand that there is a “bigger picture”; that once we stop thinking of ourselves as the center of the universe, that it would be ridiculous to think that it is unusual that our paths would not cross more than once, or only when we make and keep planned dates. That seems to be an exaggeration of our ability to control our environment, or maybe an expression of our need to control it. Seen in a context of the randomness, the stochasticity of  all the possible experiences people can have, the tiny, random events that surprise us seem to be just failures of our own imagination, a misunderstanding of the depth of time and the size of the universe. I am not sure what the message is – except that I will probably bump into you soon!

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