{"id":347,"date":"2011-09-24T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2011-09-24T16:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoddsmustbecrazy.com\/?p=347"},"modified":"2011-09-24T09:00:18","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T16:00:18","slug":"two-out-of-thirty-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/2011\/09\/24\/two-out-of-thirty-million\/","title":{"rendered":"Two out of Thirty Million"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>(Submitted<\/strong> by reader\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/theoddsmustbecrazy.com\/tag\/bethany-g\">Bethany G<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>I<\/strong> lived in California and went to college, and lived in a small residence of 50 people down the hall from a Japanese student.<\/p>\n<p><strong>About<\/strong> 15 years later I went to Tokyo, and was walking down the subway platform of one of the numerous subway systems in Tokyo, and I <em>literally<\/em> bumped into him. We were both utterly, utterly astonished that this could happen in a city of 30 <em>million<\/em> people. I had lost touch with him until then, and actually hadn&#8217;t even expected to be in Tokyo at that time, let alone bump into someone I had lived two doors down the hall from for three years in college.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Updated<\/strong>\u00a05\/8\/2012<\/p>\n<p><strong>Below<\/strong>\u00a0are the exact notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.skepticality.com\/laugh-science\/\">Skepticality Episode 182<\/a>. Take a look and leave your comments below.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Well<\/strong>, it seems that the odds of this happening would be two in 30 million (and it&#8217;s a great title for\u00a0the post), but they really aren&#8217;t. Here are some monkey wrenches in that estimate:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The<\/strong> odds of running into someone and that person being from that residence hall are 50\u00a0times the odds of it being any specific person.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The<\/strong> odds of someone from Japan returning to Japan after college are relatively high\u00a0compared to the odds of students from other countries returning home.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Normally<\/strong>, the odds of running into someone you knew is higher than one expects\u00a0because the fact that you once knew them means that you shared some values or habits\u00a0of some kind, which increases the probability that one can be found in a given location.\u00a0However, in this case, the subway is an extremely common mode of travel in Tokyo, so\u00a0the location is not as influential.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The<\/strong> odds of this event occurring at some point also rely on how long the author was in\u00a0Tokyo, how active she was during that time, how active the friend was during that time,\u00a0etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>This<\/strong> story is comparable to the other stories of running into people, like mine. They seem like<br \/>\nstories of fate, but they would really only be astonishing if we predicted them \u2013 details intact.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I lived in California and went to college, and lived in a small residence of 50 people down the hall from a Japanese student.<\/p>\n<p>About 15 years later I went to Tokyo, and was walking down the subway platform of one of the numerous subway systems in Tokyo, and I literally bumped into him. We were both utterly, utterly astonished that this could happen in a city of 30 million people. I had lost touch with him until then, and actually hadn&#8217;t even expected to be in Tokyo at that time, let alone bump into someone I had lived two doors down the hall from for three years in college.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[262,6],"tags":[797,628,803,804,805,806],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-skepticality","category-stories","tag-bethany-g","tag-california","tag-college","tag-japan","tag-subway","tag-tokyo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}