Cambridge Coincidences Collection

As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates.

understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

Many of the animations were produced using Flash and will no longer work.

Well I Never!

Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University wants to know about your coincidences!

Programme of interest

As my wife and I never watched the TV series "Person of Interest" when it started and didn’t watch any later episodes because they wouldn’t make sense, we bought the first three series on DVD and have been watching those. We are still only partway through series two. I realised that this situation might never end and eventually we would have to buy more series on DVD as I hadn’t kept track of which episodes were currently showing on TV. We watched one episode on DVD last night. Yesterday I put my back out working in the garden and my activities are currently limited as a consequence, so after lunch today I looked through the TV guide for some daytime TV to watch. I virtually never watch TV in the early afternoon. I noticed that "Person of Interest" was about to start on one channel and idly wondered which episode it was although I had no intention of watching it. On checking I discovered that it was the first episode of series four, so I immediately programmed our recorder to record the entire series.

Meeting John Denver

I had attended a workshop where John Denver’s songs helped clarify my decision to marry. On Friday I actively thought about how he could contact John Denver to say thank you but dismissed it as a crazy idea. I was surprised to find on opening the next day’s newspaper that John Denver would be in Singapore the following week. I shared the story with my friend Carol who called who her friend Shirley who worked at the hotel where John Denver would be staying. Shirley called me asked me to send a fax for her to pass to John Denver. Shirley reported later that she was standing with fax in hand and John Denver appeared from the lift. She passed the letter to him and John Denver called me on Sunday evening saying how pleased he was that the author enjoyed his songs. This is synchronicity in action. At a significant moment in my life (deciding to get married) I wanted to thank John Denver and two days later he called me at home. There had been no planning, no knowing and no logic, just a synchronistic event that seemed to confirm that getting married was the right thing to do.

Given $15,000

In November 1995 I was looking at my financials for the month and realised that I needed $15,000 to balance the books that month. I wondered to myself “how am I going to find that ?”10 minutes later I received a call from a Dutch partner who was booked to speak in Beijing the following week but could not attend. He was calling to ask me to go in his place, and he indicated that the fee would be $15,000. I needed $15,000 and within 10 minutes it appeared.

Check Amount

I went out at lunch time one day to get a hair cut. The name of the salon was 18/8 Salon. After my haircut, I walked over to the grocery store and picked up a few items for lunch. Fruit, a drink, snack, and a few items from the salad bar (which is priced by weight). My bill upon check-out was $18.08.

Identity theft scare

Some years ago I registered the domain name for my website honeypi.org.uk. I checked on the Internet for existing associations between the words "honey" and "Pi" but found very few. One prominent one was the song "Pi" sung by Kate Bush on the CD "A sea of honey" in her album "Aerial". Being mathematically minded I bought the album and enjoyed that song. A few years later I discovered that someone else had registered the domain name honeypi.co.uk, very similar to my own. I looked up the owner of the domain and found my own name there! Suspecting some form of identity theft I checked my financial security, but all was well. When I accessed the domain I was directed to an unrelated website for a holiday cottage in Devon, which seemed strange. Was someone hoping to gain extra clients by using a similar website name to my own? Eventually I emailed my namesake. He was a beekeeper planning to use a Raspberry Pi computer to monitor the temperature and humidity of his hives and his currently unused domain name had accidentally been linked to the website for the holiday cottage that he co-owned.

RIPD

I was watching Kevin Bacon and Ryan Reynolds in 'RIPD' when I became aware of the annoying buzz of a housefly. As the two cops prepared for a drug bust showdown,the fly decided the TV was the most interesting place to be,and began traversing the screen, just as our heroes pronounced themselves before entering the hoods hideout. 'SWAT!!!!' The fly exited stage left!

London bus 1942

My parents were refugees from Prague. They were about to become homeless in Kent. My mother on a bus in London found herself next to an old school friend from Prague who was about to leave for USA. Her friend was looking for a tenant for their house in London.

Unlikely meeting

In the summer holidays after my first year at University, I undertook an epic trip across S America overland. At one point I was in the vast Pantanal wetlands, and had just arrived at a hammock camp made for backpackers in a fairly remote part of it. As I put my rucksack in a hammock, I heard someone say my name, looked up, and found the student who had been on the lab bench opposite me for all our laboratory practicals for the year was in the hammock hanging next to it. (I'm embarrassed to admit that in the entire year before we had never really become more than passing acquaintances, and certainly neither of us had any idea that the other was intending to travel to S America)

Morocco

Many years ago my partner Benny & I gave up our lives in the city, bought a van and went off travelling around Europe. We ended up in the Costa Del Sol for the winter and met another couple Richard and Jenny who had been living on the road for years. They were buskers who lived from day to day. Often bars would let them perform but only offer them drinks as payment. We became and friends and they took us to places we would never have found ourselves to camp and we spent Christmas and New Year with them. We decided to come back to the UK for 6 months, replace our vehicle for a larger van like theirs and off we went again. It had not been planned but we ended up in Spain again around the Autumn. Journeying along the coast we asked various travellers if they had seen these two but no one knew of them. We didn't really feel like spending another winter in Spain and wanted more adventure so in November we headed to Morocco without any specific travel plans. We went through the forests, just got through the mountain before the snow barriers went down, into the sahara and by late December decided to head towards the coast.

electrical fault

One day I was in the kitchen with my son and the kettle began to boil. I asked my son if he had put the kettle on and he said no. I said you must have because it wasn't me. He said it was you mum, stop messing with me. It was around the time of the anniversary of my sisters death and I had been thinking about her a lot. A few days later my son & I were in the kitchen again and the kettle began to boil. This time neither of us were near it and we both looked at each other. I said there you go... it's done it again! I thought maybe there's an electrical fault or something so for a while afterwards I always made sure that there was water in it just in case it happened when no one was around but it never happened again when I was in the house. Also a day or so later I was alone in the house and the smoke detector went off but there was no smoke or heat or anything to cause this to happen. Approximately a year later ie around the anniversary date I was home alone.

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