Neighbours

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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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Some 30 years ago I attended a housewarming party. At this party, unbeknown to me, was a couple (who I had never met before and, in fact, didn't speak to during the course of the party and don't remember even seeing) who, when we moved to the other side of the country 20 years later, turned out to be our next door neighbours - although it was some years before we established this fact, and only after after we both realised that the people giving the housewarming party were acquaintances (not even close friends) of both of us.
Total votes: 285
Date submitted:Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:26:25 +0000Coincidence ID:5032

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For many years I had had a musical friend (we both played in the same amateur orchestra) who I stayed with on occcasions at her parents' house. Some 40 years later (having moved from the South-East to the West Country) and doing freelance office work on a local farm, I was talking to my co-worker of a number of years and she was telling me about a recent weekend away visiting a friend who happened to live in the same village as my friend of 40 years ago. It turned out that my friend and her family had lived next door to this friend of my co-worker, and they knew each other extremely well.

During my freelance working life I worked for many years for a well known film director at his home and at Pinewood Studios when he was making a film. Many years later when we moved from the South-East to the West Country, we bought a cottage in a small hamlet from a couple who (unbeknown to us at the time) had also had connections with Pinewood Studios - he had been a Director of Photography there. Subsequently, we met and became very friendly with the lady who had lived in this same cottage and sold it to this Director of Photography. It turned out that she had worked for many years as a Wardrobe Mistress at Pinewood Studios, and her husband also worked there as part of a film crew. None of us discovered this connection until some years later.