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!

The letter

Several years ago my parents decided to visit Portugal. Just before they left for the airport the postman delivered several letters. My father glanced at them. The usual junk mail and bills plus one letter with the wrong address on it. He noticed that the letter was addressed to a Mr Ashley , my fathers surname. The address however was a street about 500 metres away. He decided to deliver the letter his self on the way to the airport. After all it might be important and he was going away for two weeks. My parents arrived in Portugal. They checked into a hotel. The following morning my father decided to take a bus to the next village. He was waiting at the bus stop and got into a conversation with an English couple. The usual conversation took place about where each other lived in the UK. After a few seconds it was discovered that they lived in the same town. They had the same surname, and that my father had delivered a letter to their house the day before.

Sisterhood

I was in the kitchen at our home in Melbourne, Australia when my older sister came home fom High School one day & my Mum asked, "How was your day"? She replied that a new girl from Scotland had started at the school & the teacher asked my sister to be her 'buddy'. When my younger sister got home from Primary School, my Mum asked her this question & she gave the same answer as my older sister. My 2 sisters at different schools had each been asked out of a class of about 30 students to befriend 2 Scottish sisters!

September the 5th

a) My paternal Grandfather died on September 5th, 1997, my paternal Grandmother died on September 5th, 2001. My sister's son was born September 5th, 2005. All to the day, 4 years apart! b) I had a vision one night when I was about 12 years old that I was holding a neighbour's garden hose. The very next day, I was walking passed her house as she was watering the garden. Her phone statred to ring & so she asked me to hold the hose as she ran to answer it.

Mr Robert Austin

Today I activated the e-mail from the British Museum in London which they sent me as a week ago I became a 'friend of the museum'. This activation resulted in their sending me another e-mail with a password they described as temporary and suggested should be changed by me. This temporary password consisted of 7 characters (digits and letters). It was the same as the password I would have selected as the 7 character password for this specific organisation/situation. I say this as I have a password 'system' to help memorise them and the system requirements were fully met. As there are 10 diigits, 26 lowercase letters and 26 uppercase letters what were the chances? Is it 7 factorial x 10 x 26 x 26 = 34,070,400?

6.6.06

in the course of a working lifetime as a solicitor a main source of information has been the publication woodfall on landlord and tenant looseleaf in 4 large volumes regularly updated by a legal clerk with a separate volume forming the index.This has been next to my desk for nearly 40 years.I would estimate that in that time i have only needed to refer to it 6 times a year or less.my experience of it has been that although apublication of inestimable value i have always had to draw a parallel eg similar considerations may apply to the recovery of service charge as to rent.the only day on which it ever gave me the precise answer to the question which the young surveyor had asked me earlier on that day was the 6th june 2006-the three sixes.The number of the paragraph in woodfall which held the unequivocal answer-6.6.06 I seem to be rather prone to coincidences running throughout my life but only on average perhaps once a year but when they do occur they can be as impressive as the above

Is it coincidence or just life as it should be?

I've just left a posting and thought I'd write how I've come to this web site, some would say a chain of events or coincidences. Back in December last year my wife and I received a letter from Tesco proposing to take over a disused public house and convert it to an Express supermarket. For various reasons we were apposed. The letter had a form that we filled out and were going to return to Tesco. At that point we learned the Parrish Council had called a meeting of our villagers to gauge reaction of this proposal from Tesco. The meeting planned for our community hall would hold 200 people, on the evening of the meeting there were too many villagers to fit in the hall, our vicar offered the use of the church. More than 600 people felt the same as my wife and I. The meeting had many comments with many others agreeing. I felt the Parrish Council would have difficulty to work with the villagers in a organised manner and suggested they put together a committee to handle all the objections, this was wholly agreed.

Same Thoughts

Not sure if you'd call these coincidences. We have experienced a phenomena from the early days of being together on a very regular basis, so regular that it is followed by such a comment as, "no surprise there then!" We have occurrences where our thoughts are linked e.g. I'll think of having a cup of tea, Dawn, my wife, will put the kettle on, then ask if I would like a cup of tea? At the same time we may say shall we go to...... or I wounder what so & so is doing..... We have these so regular and accept them as part of our relationship I'm unable to remember the last significant detail.

Chance meeting in italy

In September 2003 my wife and I, from Edinburgh, went to a restaurant in Siena which had long communal tables. We sat next to a geologist and his wife from California and afterwards went with them to a concert at the nearby Anglican church. We did not exchange contact details or plan to meet further. Our next time in Italy was in July 2004. We went into a pavement cafe in Florence for pre-dinner drinks. After ordering the drinks we saw that the people at the next table were the same geologist and wife, this time together with further family members who were there to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary.

Two memorials and a soldier's grave

Dear Sir, I am employed on Clarendon Park Estate nr.Salisbury Wiltshire.On the estate there is a small burial site containing the graves of some of the previous owners,namely the Christie-Miller family.On the burial site is a memorial to Lt.M.V.Christie- Miller, of the Coldstream Guards who was KIA on 30thJuly 1944. He was serving with the 6th Guards Armoured Brigade during the Normandy Breakout and was killed when his tank was hit near the village of Morichese,south of Caumont. The first co-incidence occured in 1996 when I visited the Wildfowl Trust site at Slimbridge nr. Gloucester and went for a walk along the estuary.To my complete surprise I came across a war memorial and on it was enscribed the name...Lt.M.V.Christie-Miller.The memorial was raised by a school in Winchester to commemorate pupils killed during WW2. The second co-incidence occurred in 1999 during a family holiday in Brittany.We drove out one day to visit south Normandy and when returning that evening to our cottage,we had to navigate back through the town of Vire.My wife was driving,I was map reading and we ended up heading north of Vire instead

Time travel

We were sitting one evening at bedtime with our five-year-old son Peter, reading the Dorling Kindersley encyclopedia of prehistory, looking at Stone Age technology. The following morning, I was out in the shed when he came in and asked, Daddy, is this a flintcore? I looked, and he had a perfect example of a flintcore in his hand. Exactly like the one we'd been looking at in the book, in fact. (A flintcore is a piece of flint from which a skilled napper has removed a number of sharp flakes for use as knife blades and arrowheads.) We lived at the time in the alluvial Severn Vale, many miles from the nearest chalkdown. He had found the flintcore in a grow-bag in the garden - where someone had travelled 100,000 years in the night to show him.

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