Outlier, you're going to hate this

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.

The last problem I had in math was trying to work out how to combine a poisson distribution with an exponential distribution to get queue depths. I am not a mathematician but work has forced me into some understanding. (Sigh, discreet mathematics is so much easier.) Despite the following, I am also a godless philistine and to my disappointment the following experiences get less frequent the older I get. My father has similar experiences, but I don't know about previous generations. I don't know if it has also tailed off for my father who surpasses me in this kind of reverse delayed choice quantum eraser thing. As a thirteen year old, my sister and I were in the back seat on the way to Peterborough Ontario. She suggested playing hangman, which is a game where you have to guess the letters of a word and finally the word, before completing the drawing of a hung stickman. She wrote down nine underscores and immediately, in a rush, came back a dream I had had of exactly where and when we were in. I said the answer was "Spiderman" and she showed that she had secretly written the same. I turned away and said "write down the answers to the next two" which she did and then I proceeded to correctly tell her what they were, from my dream. I was in my mid teens and working as a game shill at the Canadian National Exhibition. On a break, one of the guys pulled me into a back room to get into a horse pool. As I went to the race track with my father on a regular basis I was sure I knew everything about horse racing, and was excited. I was immediatly disappointed when they told me I had to blindly pick my horse from a bag containing bits of paper with the names of horses. I was immediately excited when I drew the winning horse and handed my draw to the bag holder excitedly saying "I won!". He looked at me blankly for a couple of seconds and then said something to the effect of the race being on the following Saturday. There was a bunch of comments and a lot of laughter. This is the moment of total confusion of premonition. You know a fact, but quickly your brain tells you that you can't know this fact. Over the next week, I was pumped and happy because I knew I had won. I was tossing my keys in the air and catching them, doing a little dance while walking to lunch, just like everyone whose getting an unexpected bonus. The guy, that pulled me in, asked me what I was so f'n pumped about and I just said "'cause I won the horse pool". He just gave me that "what kind of stupid are you" look. I didn't even pay attention to when the race was run. I just went to work and the guy that pulled me in in the first place walked me to the back room and the silence was deafening as they handed me the money. I was driving alone up the Wenige Expressway, in London Ontario, early one sunny summer morn and going way too fast. I was approaching the overpass to Highway 401 which goes from ground level up, over, and back down. As I got near, a voice as clear as a bell said "There's an accident up ahead." In that split second of initial consternation and suprise my brain gave me that: it was my own voice as I hear it; that the position of the sound was exactly from between my ears. I immediately braked, as hard as I could to not skid, and just had time to swerve around a truck that was backing up blind, back over the overpass, perhaps because the driver had missed the desired onramp.
Total votes: 122
Date submitted:Sat, 21 Jan 2012 02:58:34 +0000Coincidence ID:5634