Son's name
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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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A few years ago my daughter and I won a trip to Los Angeles, we live in Lincolnshire in the UK and had never been to the USA before. I felt guilty as we had to leave my 6 year old son Joshua at home with my husband. When we arrived in LA we were picked up by a stretch limo and taken to a posh hotel in Beverley Hills where we had a suite of rooms waiting for us. I still wished my son could have been there to see it all. As we were exhausted, I decided to run myself a bath. In the living room there was a coffee table with a selection of magazines, so I grabbed one at random and took it to read whilst relaxing in the bath. As I flicked through the pages my attention was drawn to an article about Ants, which may seem unusual but there was a large diagram of an ant identical to one I had drawn when I did a school project on ants many years ago. I stopped to look at the article in more detail and to my amazement saw that it had been written by a man called Joshua Tompkins which is my son's name! I couldn't believe what an amazing coincidence this was because, in reality, the author's name could have been any name in the entire world and yet it was my son's name. I wonder what the odds are of this happening? I brought the magazine home with me as proof of this strange event.
from Susan Tompkins
Date submitted:Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:15:37 +0000Coincidence ID:5429
