Identity theft scare

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.

Some years ago I registered the domain name for my website honeypi.org.uk. I checked on the Internet for existing associations between the words "honey" and "Pi" but found very few. One prominent one was the song "Pi" sung by Kate Bush on the CD "A sea of honey" in her album "Aerial". Being mathematically minded I bought the album and enjoyed that song. A few years later I discovered that someone else had registered the domain name honeypi.co.uk, very similar to my own. I looked up the owner of the domain and found my own name there! Suspecting some form of identity theft I checked my financial security, but all was well. When I accessed the domain I was directed to an unrelated website for a holiday cottage in Devon, which seemed strange. Was someone hoping to gain extra clients by using a similar website name to my own? Eventually I emailed my namesake. He was a beekeeper planning to use a Raspberry Pi computer to monitor the temperature and humidity of his hives and his currently unused domain name had accidentally been linked to the website for the holiday cottage that he co-owned. He was equally surprised about me and my website, which he didn't know about. His cottage was not far from a church in Devon about which I needed some information for a history project that I was doing and at my request he got a colleague in the area to send me photographs of the church to assist me. The location of his cottage appealed to my wife and I, so we took a short holiday break in the smaller cottage next door to his as his was too large for us. While we were there we went for walks along the coast close by the village. I discovered that on one of these walks we had passed by the home of a very reclusive singer, Kate Bush! This single tale is described along with other coincidences on my other website menstemporum.uk, but as I attribute most of those to the phenomenon of precognition they are outside the scope of this survey. However, anyone interested in this phenomenon, even maybe as a scientific possibility, may find the website worth visiting as much for its entertainment value as anything. There is even an explanation why I chose not to attend Cambridge University to study pure mathematics, but that could just have been just a coincidence.
Total votes: 819
Date submitted:Fri, 01 Jul 2016 08:26:14 +0000Coincidence ID:8586