On Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:02:24 -0500, Sean C
<redhawk@burnspammersalive.com> wrote:

I just had an incredibly bizarre experience involving coincidences. I
was talking to a friend yesterday, and we were discussing coincidences
and how people interpret them in a religious sense. I had earlier been
reading a book about Mexico, and the author was explaining how much
information you could convey using sign language and gestures, even if
you don't know the language.

Well, on the way home after seeing a movie involving guys with guns
robbing someone, i decided to stop at the local take-out Chinese
restaurant, and literally five minutes before I got there I was
thinking about how this area has almost no crime, and there has been
maybe one murder in the last 20 years. I thought about how I had never
heard of a store being robbed at gunpoint up here.

Well, when i entered the restaurant, the owners began to make gestures
like guns indicating that they had just been robbed! I immediately
called the cops, and then tried to find out what had happened. They
could scarcely speak a word of English (mostly just numbers), and I
know no Chinese, but I was able to piece together what had happened
using sign language and gestures, and gave a description of the
suspects to the police. I was then able to get them to call their
nephew, who speaks English and Chinese, and I was amazed by how much I
had gotten right--and how much I had gotten wrong. I got the ages,
approximate height, clothes and hair color right, that the two shortest
guys were carrying the guns, and the tallest guy was carrying the money
in a green bag, that they had got the money in the cash drawer but not
the money that was under it, and that they thought one of the guys had
once worked at the pizza place next door, and had a funny walk. What I
gotten wrong is that they were not three black guys, but three white
guys, two of whom were wearing all black clothes.

The coincidences here were so unreal it totally blew my mind. Here I
was talking about coincidences earlier, reading about communicating
without understanding someone else's language, seeing a movie involving
robbery with guns, and then thinking about the crime rate in my area,
only to come across a situation involving all these things.

I believe that given the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of
indvidual thoughts, experiences and actions we have in a day, it is
inevitable that our preceptions will cross paths with reality in such a
way that is so improbable as to make those of religious bent believe
they are psychic or that some devine force is manipulating events in
some way. I find these kind of things happening very frequently, such
as the classic one of thinking about a friend you haven't seen in
years, only to have that person call that very day, or thinking about a
plane crash and turning on the TV to see that a plane has just crashed.
I often heard such coincidences cited by the faithful as evidence of
the existence of God (well, how do you explain *this*, then...). Given
enough time, the improbable becomes the probable, and coincidences
occur.

I am wondering if anyone has ever sat down and tried to calculate the
probability of the improbable (probably not) and come up with some
figures on the likelihood that bizarre happenstance will strike you.
Anybody else have any wierd anecdotes to share?

Sean C

In chapter 7 of Richard Dawkins book, "Unweaving the Rainbow", he
covers this subject. In the chapter he relates a story where his wife
bought a used watch for her mother at a pawn shop or garage sale, and
it had a price tag stuck on it. When she got home, she took off the
price tag and found that her mothers three initials were engraved on
the watch. He then goes on to estimate the odds of this happening and
concludes that the chances of this happening are not as unlikely as
one would first assume.