how i met my wife

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.

in my university days i spent a lot of time in the computer lab chatting on this local-network only server. one fellow took a liking to me, and we met in person and started hanging out outside of the university setting. one day he left for a student conference, came back and told me he had met someone he thinks i should hook up with so gave me this girl's email address. anyway so i emailed her. after a few weeks of emailing back and forth it turned out that she lived around the corner (like a 5 minute walk) from this place in another city that i always used to visit during my school holidays. and that her grandfather and my mum's uncle were best friends at some point. and that her father who grew up in my city but moved to her city to marry her mum had actually lived a stone's throw from the house my grandfather lived in and then later died in. also my mum and my now wife's uncle were in the same circle of friends growing up (even hung out with each other when they were younger). i recently learned that at the level of her grandfather either a sister or cousin was going to marry into my mum's side of the family but he concern was that somehow this couple were too closely related to each other (a degree of cousins i think it was). nothing much came of my studies as i ended up dropping out (i recollect literally spending long hours reading the economist magazine in the library, among some personal struggles i had at the time). my wife ended up becoming an economist, and even though i dropped out of university at that point, i went back finished a different degree and now i am doing way better than had i stayed and finished and entered the career i was studying. because my future wife lived in another city we mostly communicated via telephone and email. from start to day of the wedding took more than a decade. now i also had a weird obsession with the subject of statistics. so one day as i applied for a job just after dropping out of university i took a liberty and told the interviewer that i knew statistics (i didn't know but she meant descriptive not inferential statistics so it turned out ok). this put me in pole position for a job in the then niche contact centre industry. after many years working in this industry i came to the conclusion that while it was extremely profitable for me i have hated telephones and chatting over the internet (even though for the bulk of my working life i literally enabled people to connect to each other the internet and worked in several teams related to the act of making a phone call or sending an email). the weird thing is that even though i hated telephones and chatting over the internet my day job now literally requires me to do exactly that (as a consumer not producer) and furthermore enables people to stay in different cities for short periods of time (i am in the travel industry now but not actually a travel agent). before this i had worked in finance. i also ended up working at a company regarded as a top place to be had i actually finished that earlier degree.
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Date submitted:Fri, 12 Jul 2019 18:13:42 +0000Coincidence ID:10308