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!

Mystified I stopped reading McLuhan, within minutes Eco saves the day

About 5 years ago, I decided to give Marshall McLuhan another go. When I was in unversity 30 years ago, I tried reading him but I found much of what he wrote inpenetrable. What I was really wanting to read was an essay entitled Hyperreality by Umberto Eco which I had just picked up from the library but since I was making some headway with McLuhan I decided to keep plugging on with McLuhan until I got to a part where he started to refer to things as being red or green. I had absolutely no idea what he meant. Irritated by his lack of consideration for his readers, I threw the book on the floor and picked up Eco's book. </p> <p>Up until that point I had never read anything by Eco and knew nothing of his area of expertise. I had recently come across a quote from his essay on Hyperreality which is what sparked my interest. Even though I was very keen to start reading the essay, I looked at the Index and saw an essay entitled "Guerilla Warfare" a topic which doesn't hold much interest for me. For whatever reason I decided to look at that essay.

The death of my cat

I was living abroad in New Zealand (I am from the United States), and working in vineyards there. I was renting a room in a flat with a few other seasonal workers, and I had no internet or telephone. I would go once or twice a week to contact my mom back in the US, to see how she was doing, and catch up on events back in my hometown. One Saturday morning when I was off of work, I was sitting alone at the breakfast table playing guitar. I suddenly had the overwhelming sensation - a sense of knowing and absolute assuredness - that my cat had died. I began to write a small song about her and her brother. I didn't think anymore of it for the rest of the day. That evening, I went to check my e-mail for the first time in a few days. Waiting for me in my inbox was an e-mail from my mother that the cat had died. She was only 5 years old, and it was entirely unexpected.

nicola

My sister recently died just before Christmas suffering from cancer for a year, I spent most of the last 5 months with her - she died in the early morning the day after my birthday when I was not with her as I was taking a much needed break while she was in a hospice having respite care - she was due to come back home but in the end went very very quickly much to everyone surprise. She lived in my mothers house and I had taken a sabbatical and moved in to nurse her,we were incredibly close. In the living room were some lights in the display cupboard all along one wall. During my sisters illness when things were very bad the lights stopped working I tried to get them to come on and they just would not work I and as things were very stressful did nothing more about it. Upon return to my mother's house after my sister's funeral the lights were all on. I asked the rest of the family who had managed to fix them but no-one had - they had just started working again. At the funeral some of my sisters colleagues came and brought with them letters from other colleagues along with photographs of my sister at various work events.

Obituary

In early April 1997 my Father died in UK. In France six weeks later my son, who was going to the International School in Bordeaux and taking his 'A' levels that summer got off the train with a paper. We live normally in HK but I had gone back for three months to our house in France so that he could come home every weekend. This Friday when I went to meet him at the train station in Perigueux he arrived with the Daily Telegraph which was in those days from the day before. I was delighted as in the late 90's English newspapers in our small French village were not available. What was even more amazing was that on page 29 he showed me the obituary of my Father who was ex RAF and had fought in the Battle of Britain. My son in the previous weeks had never bought home a paper and he didn't bother to do so again but for some reason he bought it that day and there was this obituary which my brother in law had sent to the Daily Telegraph just after my Father's death in early April.

10 min after my PC monitor died, I found another in a lift

About 6 years ago my computer monitor died which was disasterous because I was utterly broke after being laid off. Even a secondhand monitor was outside my budget. Utterly depressed I grabbed my coat to go outside. When the doors of a lift opened there sittiing on the floor was a computer moniter. I couldn't believe my eyes. I jumped in grabbed it and took it back to my flat to see if it worked and it did. Having lived in this building for 18 years, this was the only time I have ever seen anything left in any of the three lifts. C.C.

message in a bottle

At the age of about 10, a couple of friends and I threw bottles with messages into the river. One was found a couple of years later by a kid further downstream, another 5 years later. My friends wrote to their bottles' finders for quite a while. I forgot about mine as time passed and I left home for university. My father, a teacher at the local high school, was confounded when one of his students bought into class the note I'd written, 'Is this your daughter?'. The student had recently moved to the area, having found the bottle near his prior home several hundred kms away near the river mouth. The message in a bottle had taken 11 years to travel down the river, then was bought right back to where it had been initially 'sent'.

lucky break comes in twos

I was flatting with a couple of young lads, both had been fruitlessly searching for work for quite some time and had been getting quite depressed by their situations. Then one afternoon, one lad's phone started ringing, so he went to the front of the house to talk as the second guy's phone also rang, and he went out the back. The first guy was all smiles when he returned to the living room, 'I got a job!' The second guy returned just in time to return the smiles 'So did I!'

Digital clock synchronicity

The time 11:11 has been displayed many, many times when I look at the clock while in bed and I cannot explain it. I can be reading a book for ages and then decide to see what the time is, and it is 11:11. I have gone to sleep really early and roll over in my sleep only to open my eyes and it says 11:11! But not so long ago I had a really weird happening. I always wake up two or three times a night - I am 62 YO - but this night was different. The first time I awoke the clock read 2:22 and I went back to sleep. The next time I woke up the clock read 3:33! I thought that was cool! The third time I awoke the clock read 4:44! No way, I said to myself, this is really creepy! It took me a while to get back to sleep after that. But the next time I awoke and looked to see if it was time to get up the clock read 5:55!!!! I was really shocked by this and not a little rattled. I felt really uneasy for a long while after that occurred and could not get it out of my mind. What could possibly account for that? I thought something must have been waking me up at those precise times. It has never happened again.

Train to London

I was going to London from Birmingham for my birthday. There was a fire at Milton Keynes, so instead of taking the first class express straight through we had to go via the Cotswolds and hope for a seat. I sat facing backwards. One table down facing me was a man I'd never met before but who I was able to see throughout the journey. The following day, after a trip to the Tower Of London, we met with friends in Covent Garden for a pub lunch. We went to a random pub that we walked past and liked the look of - and sat in the corner of the pub was the man who I spent the train trip looking at the previous day.

Answer on the radio

My daughter and I were in the car one afternoon, I was taking her to a birthday party for one of her classmates. We were listening to the radio. Having never visited this house before, when we reached the road I slowed down and asked her what was the number of the house we were looking for. Before she could answer the radio DJ said "number 14" at exactly the right moment. The house we were looking for was No 14. We just looked at each other in amazement.

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