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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Things That Make You Go Hmmmm - Odds are these historical coincidences will strike you as unlikely. |
| 2018-09-03 |
| [WSJ] Sen. John McCain died Aug. 25 of a brain tumor, a glioblastoma. Sen. Ted Kennedy died of the same disease, also on Aug. 25, nine years earlier. That’s quite a coincidence. But in a world as wide as this one, extremely unlikely things happen every day. Last spring a friend of mine had a straight flush in a hand of five-card draw poker. There are 2,598,960 possible hands in five-card draw, only 36 of which beat the lowest straight flush. So the odds of losing while holding a straight flush are about 1 in 72,000. He lost anyway. History provides endless examples of odds even longer than that: |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #5 Cheaderhead. I recently visited Port Washington. No 'hmmmm' but pleanty of 'wow.' What a lovely place. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2018-09-03 17:15 |
| #4 And then there is the ultimate in coincidence and good or bad luck. The gentleman who was in Hiroshima on business when the bomb was dropped. Surviving he was evacuated to his home in Nagasaki. Just in time for Bock's Car and Fat Man And then there's Robert Todd Lincoln who fell off a train platform and was rescued by Edwin Booth. One sees these things in their own life. My brother pulled into a parking space at Yellowstone and as he was getting out of the car the guy in the car next to him getting out was the guy he worked next to My dad was in the liquor store next to Circus Circus looking for a bottle of Brandy. Not finding what he wanted he goes up to the register and asks if they have any J Bavet (it's a Wisconin thing). The clerk answers "no we dont, and we don't have any goddamn Sunnyside Club either" Turns out the clerk knew the old man from the neighborhood watering hole. |
| Posted by: Cheaderhead 2018-09-03 17:07 |
| #3 • Of the dozen or so most significant men of the 19th century, two, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, were born on the same day, Feb. 12, 1809. Lincoln was born in a dirt-floored one-room log cabin 3 miles south of Hodgenville, Ky., Darwin in upper-middle-class comfort in Shrewsbury, England. Of course, if you factor in the time difference, it may have been the 11th in the US when Darwin was born or the 13th in the UK when Lincoln was born. Say, isn't the University of Kentucky's abbreviation "UK"? In another odd historical coincidence, there was an event in the run up to the American Revolution called the "Gaspee Affair" in which American colonialists attacked the British customs schooner "Gaspee" in 1772 after it ran aground while chasing contrabrand. The ship was boarded and burned by the attackers. One attacker was named ABRAHAM Whipple. Another key figure in this attack was named...John Brown. Oh, and this John Brown was a slave trader. |
| Posted by: charger 2018-09-03 14:15 |
| #2 The other meteorite strike landed in Mrs. Hodge's hip after bouncing off her radio, and left a nasty bruise. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2018-09-03 09:58 |
| #1 For further reading see: The Improbability Principle, David J. Hand and/or The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2018-09-03 04:13 |