Three coincidences

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.

I'm not sure whether I can have three but the first one's very short. My brother, four of my cousins (from different branches of the family) and my late aunt have birthdays on 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th of October = different years, obviously! The second coincidence is this. I had a peripatetic life with a father in the armed forces so I attended a lot of schools. I joined the WRAF myself and served as a teleprinter operator. I married an airman in 1972. More moving. In March 1974 he was posted to Cyprus. One day, a month or so after our arrival, I was standing in a queue in the NAAFI store in Limassol when the woman in front of me happened to see me and did a visible double take. She turned out to be someone I'd worked with when I was a teleprinter operator in the UK 2 years previously. I regularly have people recognising me but I never reciprocate because I suffer from a mild form of prosopagnosia. I can't recognise people unless I know them really well and meet them regularly - sometimes even not then - and that is very embarrassing indeed at times! The third is that I finally managed to go to university in 1990 when I was 40 (when my marriage was breaking up). I read Linguistics at Loughborough. I joined the Christian Union there (more for something to do than any conviction) and attended the local Anglican church because I'd always loved singing and had been in a lot of church choirs (the only outlet for someone who kept moving around all the time - there was always a church with a choir somewhere nearby, wherever we were). The University Registrar came to CU meetings fairly regularly and always talked to me. Apart from the fact that he was married, because sometimes his wife came as well, I didn't know much about his personal life. When I graduated and left Loughborough I decided to move to Winchester because my mother's family had come from Hampshire and Winchester was the nearest I could get to the area where they'd lived. In Loughborough I'd shared a house with a couple of other mature students and we'd had to move to a village outside the town when our landlord decided to sell it. I can't drive and I couldn't get to the Anglican church any more but there was a small Baptist chapel just down the road so I went there. When I came to Winchester I decided to continue as a Baptist so I joined the Baptist church. After a few weeks I made friends with an elderly lady during after-service coffee and got chatting to her. It turned out that she was the mother of Loughborough University's Registrar!
Total votes: 252
Date submitted:Sat, 11 Apr 2020 16:38:29 +0000Coincidence ID:10426