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!

Interrailing

When 18 and inter-railing around Europe we arrived at our first camp site in Avignon to find that we has no tent pegs.... On leaving the campsite to try and find a shop to buy some we walked into some friends who had left school the previous year who had a spare set of tent pegs!!!

Work colleague finds old photos of me in his new house

As a student I worked in medical records in a London Hospital. A new colleague came in one morning saying he had moved into a new house over the weekend and found photos of me in a drawer. Turns out he had moved into the house that my friend had just moved out of. My friend had left some photos, including some of me, in the drawer!

swiss army knife

When i was a kid, i would guess around the age of 10, on a hot summers day, my friends and i had been playing football in the local park. We all sat down for a rest, i could see something metal protruding from the soil, so i excavated it carefully and it was a swiss army knife with the name "LUKE" engraved on the outer case!

I know that book!

we were selling our house and showing around a young couple. The man picked a book out of our extensive collection of books and said "my parents wrote that book". It was a specialised psychology book that would not have been in general circulation. They bought the house!

Mr

Whilst at borading school in the early 1970's I went on a family holiday to Menorca. We arrived late at night and wnet to bed. I woke up early the enxt morning and open the bedroom curtains to see the view. Looking down at the hotel swimming pool there was only one person settling down by a sun lounger. It was the matron from my school! Thereafter, if ill, I was aksed if I wanted to be signed off games rather than being told I was :-)

Birth certificate surprise

I am male and was born in 1968. My surname is not very common, Hern, and my Dad's name Christian name is John. In 1998 I married a girl called Rebecca. Years later, in 2011, when we were sorting through some important documents, I came across my wife's birth certificate. She was born in 1971 and her birth was registered 3 days later by a registrar with the name........ John Hern.

Spitfire story

I used to have an electronic archiving company. Our first client in 1999 was The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight at RAF Coningsby for whom we scanned many thousands of Warbird drawings. In September 1999 we decided to scan a copy of the Daily Telegraph to demonstrate the power of our software (which could find any page using keyword searches). I volunteered to bring in an old edition which I'd kept from the day my son was born (15/4/1983). By a strange co-incidence the front page of that edition carried a story about a guy (Ray Hannah) who had just paid a lot of money for a Spitfire. But the really spooky thing was that when I bought the Telegraph that day (27/9/1999), the front page carried an article about Mr Hannah's son, Mark who had died in a Spitfire accident that weekend. The hairs on the back of my neck still stand up when I remember this.

Distant airport Duty Free

Returning from a Honeymoon in Bali the flight stopped off at Abu Dabi airport to refuel. My wife and I decided to leave the plane and have a quick look around the duty free shops in the terminal. I went to one shop and was standing at the electronics counter when I recognised a voice next to me. The person was a work colleague who was on his way back from a holiday in Australia but had missed the flight he was supposed to be on and ended up on a different flight that meant he had to change planes at Abi Dabi.

Sweet Music

About 10 years ago I was poking around Corbridge parish church about 12 miles west of Newcastle. A quartet were practising for a concert they were giving in the church that night. I had a chat to the slightly Beethovian cellist and quartet leader, and I asked him where he was from - they were giving the concert as part of a small local festival. Oh, from the south east, he said. I was from the south east, so I asked where. Oh, from a place called Berkhamsted, he said. I was from Berkhamsted (a town between Watford and Aylesbury), so I asked where. Oh, Bridgwater Road, he said. I had walked up and down it many times. I had a cousin in the town and she was musical (I had not seen her for years but we had grown up together), so I took a shot and asked if he knew a cellist from Berkhamsted called Philippa Cooper. Oh, I married her, he said.

CD / radio coincidence

I was listening to a Killers album on CD one day, when I wandered into another room and switched on a radio. The song playing on the radio was not only the same track (Mr Brightside), but the two songs were perfectly synchronized. I turned the radio volume up, and there was no discernible difference in timings. When there is a delay, even a slight one, it is very obvious to the listener. It occurred to me that the radio must be acting as a speaker by some strange phenomenon, but then the song finished and my CD moved on to the next track while the radio DJ introduced another song.

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