A newspaper date coincidence

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 the early 1990s I was living in an upstairs apartment in an old three-storey house in the small town of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada. The rest of the building was commercial space and it had not been a residence in many years. One day, with time on my hands, I started poking around in the attic, looking through old cardboard boxes that I suppose had belonged to previous residents. I found toys from the 1950s, tax returns from the 1930s, and so on. One box was lined on the bottom with a complete edition of the Halifax Herald, published in the nearest city. At the time I was working as a journalist so of course I pulled it out to take a look. The date on the paper was May 3, 1969 - the day I was born. There were no other newspapers in the attic. I'm unsure how unlikely a coincidence that would be, but I saved the newspaper and I still have it, 20-some years later.
Total votes: 807
Date submitted:Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:13:46 +0000Coincidence ID:3384