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and
bang!
standing in front of me is a fellow WebmasterWorld member who I have met at 2 pubcons ...
took him about 30 minutes to recover from the shock methinks.
amazing thing is that he very rarely comes to Bangkok even though he lives in Thailand, and I was just about to get into a cab 10 seconds earlier, but changed my mind.
small world or what ...
Shak
I saw a school colleague walking down Bondi Beach one day many years ago ( I am from the UK).
If I saw some people from pubcon, I would look in the other direction. Specially the ones trying to sell me SEO.
After chatting a while, he looked at his watch and said "well, gotta go fly the plane". He was the pilot. :)
Back in 2000 I lived in London and
a: Nearly got run over on Oxford Street by an old College friend who I hadnt seen in 7 years.
B: Went the wrong way down a one way passage on the tube and bumped into another old friend doing the same (!)
Really really freaky when it happens
My dad had of course fought in WWII - he was on Hawaii, then went to Saipan, then back to Hawaii with shrapnel in his knee. We heard lots of stories, and being little kids, didn't really believe much of it.... it flowed over and around us because he was HERE now, y'know?
But one trip to the midwest, we wound up in Colorado at Royal Gorge. Now that wasn't really on the beaten path to anywhere at the time. There was a bridge out over nowhere, and what looked like about a thousand miles of "straight down" to a child. And out in the middle of the bridge to nowhere over the deepest canyon we'd ever seen in our short lives, my dad met an old army buddy - the one who pulled him out of a foxhole and hauled him to the medics to be flown out to Hawaii to get the shrapnel dug out of his knee....
Weird. It was weird. What's even weirder: Daddy ran across maybe 20 more of the guys from his platoon over the course of the years I lived at home (another 12 or 13 years in all). None of them ever lived in our area. We were never "local" when he ran into them. One of them wound up working at NTS while Daddy worked there, for the same company - prior to that, they hadn't seen each other since mustering out in 1946. It was (and still is) weird, even though the world was a lot smaller then.
Thailand IS the place where unaquainted mutual friends congregate.
And of course, he IS the only Joe in the small state of Alaska.
You only recall the person you ran into at Frankfurt airport. Out of the 6 billion persons on earth, you ran into your old buddy at Frankfurt airport. That's an astronomical chance, you say.
I say no. I say the odds are much higher, because the sample space is actually not 6 billion people! Take those out, who never ever fly. Those are huge portions of Southern Americans, Africans and Asians. As a matter of fact, those are also the most densely populated spaces on our planet. From the flying-at-least-once population, you have maybe(!) 2 billion left. Still a huge number.
Now - your buddies are all more or less in the same age range. Let's assume a 30-something. So from your sample space, you take the people from toddler to 29 out, and the guys from 41 to 99. As you can see, you take almost 90% out here! So from the 2 billion you have a mere 200 million left over.
Now take into account that you know mostly people from the US. So from these 200 million, we take away everybody who is NOT a US citizen. The US census [census.gov] says there are 295.496.875 as of NOW. Given the above limitation, there's a fair chance that approximately 3.000.000 of them might fly at all.
Frankfurt airport handles about 30% of all flights going between Europe and the US. This leaves 1.500.00 people wich might go through Frankfurt from the US.
For any given day of the year we have 4109 unique people from the US going through Frankfurt.
That's a pretty good chance to run into somebody you know.
So this covers the "Sample Space" part. Now we come to "selective reporting". Due to the very nature of it, you only recall the event when YOU ran into a buddy of yours. Actually, on that very day, there were THREE other buddies of you at Frankfurt airport, which you did NOT ran into. Which you might have only missed by a few seconds.
We only hear of these strange coincidences. But the real coincidence is that it does not happen more often - because it should.
A very nice description of this phenomenon is given by - surprise - Terry Pratchett (and Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen) in the book "The Science of Discworld". Look for the cahpter "Nine times out of Ten" which deals with statistic, probability, sample spaces and selective reporting.
Now take into account that probation officers are NOT looking if their "clients" go to places where they are allowed to go. Their job is to see if they go to places which are off limits. So again, this reduced the sample space, because the percentage of probation officers in these places is higher than average.
And then of course you have to take into account the universal principle of "#*$! happens".
Can you analyze my log files for me? ;)
Your friend is also in teh same socio/economic bracket and you may expect him to do the same things as you.
Thats one of their explanantions as to why coincedences happen more often than we think.
great mag by the way on.
