Thinking about someone when they die x 3

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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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I'm sure these are just coincidences, but it feels weird. This morning my friend's brother Craig died. Oddly, I was thinking about Craig this morning. He's someone I hardly ever see (once a year perhaps, maximum) and not someone I'm close to, but a chain of thoughts triggered me to think of him for some time. Last year my uncle died. I had only seen him a couple of times in the previous decade and could count on one hand the number of times I'd thought of him in previous years. But, I was thinking about him (I can't event remember the reason why now) and found out the next day he died around the same time he crossed my mind. Almost three years ago my mother died. My sister was visiting her at the time and I had just rung her to talk about when I would visit my parents next. While I was on the phone, my mother dropped dead (my sister screamed and let go of the phone). The odds of being on the phone with my sister when my mother died arguably isn't that great, but also thinking about the other two, who were not close, around the time they died freaks me out a little. These were not premonitions, I had no sense that anything was wrong. Coincidence can get you thinking about things you didn't believe in. Difficult for statisticians to analyse, but maybe that's because we still don't understand everything about the world we live in, which isn't a reason to exclude them from the data set.
Total votes: 394
Date submitted:Sun, 26 Jan 2014 19:35:46 +0000Coincidence ID:7433