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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.

Many of the animations were produced using Flash and will no longer work.

Back when vinyl was king, after I started my first job in 1973, I started to buy back issues of bands I liked and as I used to the records to parties, I marked all my albums by writing my initials on the label in case they went walkabout. One of the albums I bought was "Through the Past Darkly" by the Rolling Stones which I lent to my boss Sandra in the office where I worked. She had it for a while, I left my job and forgot about it. When I remembered later, I went back to my old office to reclaim it, but Sandra had also moved on so I gave it up as lost. Twenty odd years later in the mid 90's, I was working as lecturer at the local college and I got chatting with a guy in my departmentabout bands we liked in common. The Rolling Stones came up and of course I bemoaned the loss of "Through the Past Darkly". He said he had a copy and offered to lend it to me. Imagine my surprise when I got it home and took it out of the sleeve to play only to find my initials on the label. The next day, a discussion with my colleague revealed that he had, by coincidence, married Sandra and thereby inherited my album - which I then got to keep!
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Date submitted:Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:07:28 +0000Coincidence ID:6134