Born in the same bed

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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.

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When I first met my future wife, I was a high school student in Northern Germany. One day a lovely new classmate arrived from India. We got to know each other better, and after a few months started dating. During our conversations I learnt a lot about India from her, and was fascinated by her stories of growing up in a world that was so different from mine. My imagination went wild, and I pictured her being born and raised in a tropical country with a bustling culture. A year later, she was going to visit India again for the first time. While she packed her suitcase, I glanced at her passport. To my astonishment, I found out that she was born in the same village as me. As it turned out, her German mother, though living in India at the time, wanted to deliver her first child in Germany. And so she'd travelled back to the place where she grew up and had her first daughter in a small cottage hospital in the tiny village of Hage. The maternity unit (if it could be called this at the time) only had a single delivery bed - the same one in which I was to be born a year later. What a surprise and coincidence I thought!
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Date submitted:Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:28:38 +0000Coincidence ID:5916