Challenge: Calculate the odds...
 

...of this occurring to me (or anyone else):
Yesterday, I downloaded the new podcast of “MacTV Videocast” on iTunes. While the long download was proceeding, I happened to be listening to some music on iTunes; some old music I had ripped from my wife’s LP some time back.

Lo and behold! When the podcast was done downloading and I started playing it, the very next song I would have been listening to on iTunes was the song that started to play on the podcast! It was “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, from 1959!

Talk about flabbergasted, astounded, blown away!
So... what are the odds?

Seems to be like when you're humming a song and turn on the radio, only to have it playing.

Coincidence? Serendipity? Some kind of sign?

Doesn't happen very often, of course.

These are fun odds to read about taken from the book Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell. See the conclusion at the bottom. The odds were 1 in 10 to the one hundred and fifty seventh power. OY!!

This is another one that makes my hair stand up on end regarding Lincoln and Kennedy. However, no one has calculated the odds. (The ending is kinda stupid, and I'm sure I could have found a better link, but the layout was clean and easier to read).

what about when I grab my cell phone right before it rings?

Am I psychic?

**Edited my typos**

The rabbis have a saying, "Coincidence is not a kosher word."

And obviously still have the last bite of it in your mouth :rolleyes:

the odds are: 0.00000315 %
 

I calculated the events mentioned above, these are the odds:

0.00000315 %

If you are exposed to a coincidence every one minute, this kind of coincidence will occur every 240 days. So it is not that weird:

0.00000315* 60 min*24 hours *240 days=1.07136

I seem to look at the clock right at 11:11 very often. Strange coincidence? Do I look at clocks often and only remember them when they are interesting like that?

The odds of looking at the clock and seeing 11:11 are 0.0014%, or 1:720. Increase that by the fact that you're either approaching lunch or late for bed, making the likelihood that you'll look at the clock that much more. And then the chance that a stopped clock has a 1:720 chance of showing that time…

Me too. But I think that possibly our subconcious mind has a pretty good grasp of what time it is at any point and chooses to nudge us to look at the clock around then???

"Never tell me the odds!"
- Han Solo

Bravo, styrafome, you get the kewpie doll for the best response to my query!
tommaso

I was about to quote that but you beat me to it.

I usually have lunch around 1:30 and go to bed around 2am... :D

Same here Carlos, except the time I always seem to look at is 10:40 (AM and PM actually.) Another coincidental thing that happens to me more often than expected is when I have iTunes on shuffle, and I think of a song that I want it to play next (or just think of any random song that I "think" it's gonna play next), and sure enough, there it goes. Maybe we should start trying to hone these ESP powers of ours! :D

I was kinda hoping for a Quad G5 with 16GB of RAM, a terabyte of onboard storage, and four 30" Cinema Displays hanging off of it...

...but the kewpie doll will do.:D

I seem to always catch 9:11 on the clock and I always think it's an omen of something bad about to happen. 911 like the phone number, not the sept 11 events. At least in my mind. I have noticed myself noticing that since 6th grade.

12:34 is another time I seem to catch alot.

Here is a good one, what are the odds that anytime I get to the bus stop, the bus has just left. If the busses run every 20 min. BECAUSE IT SEEMS LIKE THE ODDS ARE 1:1

Every day I seem to notice the time on my Alarm clock is 08:10.
40 minutes after it should have woken me.

This is very disconcerting as I should not be seeing this at all and should be in my car driving to work.

What are the odds that I can convince my boss that when this happens again (and it will ) it is just a coincidence.




:D

Waking up one minute before the alarm clock goes off . . . regularly!

- - -

Yesterday, preparing a deposit: three checks in a row from different people who had attended three different programs -- same check number on each (1077).

Yeah, that qualifies, too...

Some seeming coincidences are not actually all that unlikely. One I've always liked is that if there are 50 folks in a room, the odds are better than 50:50 that two of them have the same birthday. I told this to a class of 60 engineering students one time and it turned out that two of the students had the same birthday as mine.

We can try it on this forum which must have more than 50 regular viewers. My birthday is July 29.

I've heard that, too, even though there are 365+ days in a year...
October 16.

Actually, for 50 people, the odds are quite a bit better than 50:50 - the probability of two people out of 50 having the same birthday is around 97% !

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox

wasn't it Homer Simpson that said something like... '28% of the people know that 52% of statistics are made up on the spot'.......?

Talking of odd occurances.... when I was younger we went on a holiday to the south of France..... after a nice 2 week break we headed back to England, stopping in shortly at a petrol station to fill up...... who should pull up next to us in the car but my best friend from school who lived only half a mile away from me, 600 miles away back at home!...... now thats gotta be some crazy odds!

That's happened thrice to me.
Once, on vacation from CT in FL (at DisneyWorld), I came across the truck driver for one of our suppliers back in CT; another time, at a party in CA, I came across a gal who was a year behind me in HS in CT; the most recent time, I found that the back neighbor where I was living in NM used to ride with me on the school bus back in CT.
Weird stuff.
In reality, I think that many people we know from different areas, and different times of our lives, pass us all the time, and only once in a while do we become aware of it. Think of all the people passing us on the highways, or on airplanes, etc.

Some of the travel coincidences are not as far-fetched as we might think. I kept running into the same people during a long backpacking trip overseas, and then it finally dawned on me: We were all from the same socio-economic class in the same country, with the same vacation goals, and generally picked up the same guidebook that suggested the same hotels and sights. Any given country can be hundreds or thousands or miles wide, but let's face it, 95% of the middle-class tourists are going to go to the same few roads, trains, hotels, ATMs, and attractions. After that, the only odds left to calculate is the timing.

We may simply not be aware of the actual constraints that narrow the odds in our lives.

The odds in the other direction have to do with all the people I will not encounter simply because their class, religion, interests, and society will cause them to have living patterns that will rarely, if ever, intersect with mine, even if we live in the same town our whole lives.

Doing my homework (instead of trusting my memory) the probability of two people having the same birthday reaches 50.7297% when there are 23 people present. If there are 87 folks present, the probability that three will have the same birthday is 49.9455%. If there are 187 folks available then the probability is 50.2685% that 4 will have the same birthdate, and 5 coincidences requires 313 for a 50.1070% chance of a match.

In summary, for 50:50 coincident birthdays the numbers are: 23 for 2, 87 for 3, 187 for 4, and 313 for 5.

[from: http://www.mathcad.com/library/Libra...8/soln28.html]