June 03, 2005

• I don't accept that law of large numbers shit.
• It's the James Randi of perception.
• That was good fun. I especially liked the bullet being blasted out of the tree and into the guy.
• Yeah, it's kinda like the Darwin Awards. On an odd personal coincidence - my sister and I were both adopted at birth. Born a thousand miles and two years apart, and adopted through different agencies, we found out in our teens that we are actually "blood" cousins! My father (as in "adoptive" father) discovered that her biological father and my biological mother are brother and sister. It was a rather bizarre moment when that factoid settled in - - we just looked at eachother with curious silly looks - - suddenly everything started making sense.
• "It's tragic magic--there are no coincidences/but sometimmes, the pattern is more obvious" Vivian Stanshall/Neil Innes (Bonzo Dog Band)
• Good link...we Faithful Monkeys aren't sure the church explosion was coincidence.
• I hate to rain on God's parade (He has actually taken to carrying an umbrella of late when I am around Him), but the church choir story tells us not how many members of the choir there were nor how late any of them were. Why were they late? Was it a scheduling mix-up and no one was notified?
• Maybe the person who blew up the church mixed up the schedule, so no monkeys would be harmed in the insurance fire...
• Physical coincidence: If the density of the universe one second after the Big Bang had been greater by one part in a thousand billion, the universe would have recollapsed after ten years. On the other hand, if the density of the universe at that time had been less by the same amount, the universe would have been essentially empty when it was about ten years old. Source: Stephen Hawking, Physicist Guess ol' Dr. Hawking doesn't know the word "trillion". Idiot. I'm joking, BTW.
• Somewhere in New York, a psychology professor found a rare book he had been searching for on a street corner. But later he discovered that the psychologist who had recommended it says she never even heard of it. I don't understand this one. Did the first psychologist misunderstand the recommendation? Was there a bogus quote by the second psychologist on the book recommending it?
• That wouldn't be a coincidence, more like some kind of mental fugue. Or blue funk.
• BTW, that Hawking quote is nonsense. Something like 95% of expected matter is 'dark' matter. Point being, they don't know crap about all the forces and fundamental constituents. There just isn't the basis for the confidence to assert what Hawking did, even if it's incidentally true.
• Years and years back, I was in upper peninsula Michigan, at a summer program, and the dorms had no A/C so the window was always open. And this jackass across the street, who always had the blinds shut, kept playing the intro to Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." Over. And over. And over. I have no idea how it projected into that room so clearly. I liked the song until I heard it a hundred times a day. Anyway, the summer program ended. I went to college, left college, got a bunch of different jobs, lived in a bunch of different states and finally ended up in panhandle florida. I ended up randomly meeting someone (ok, he found me on a personals ad site) who worked at the paper in the next county over. He and I became fast friends, and it turned out we'd lived a lot of the same places -- including U.P. michigan. I mentioned to him my memory of "Wish You Were Here" being played, over and over, across from the dorm building... And he turned beet red. BEET red. Those years before, it had been him. Bwahahaha.
• At least it was some fairly decent music! I had the misfortune of living across from someone in 1990/91 that blared Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" repeatedly beginning at 7:30 a.m. and ending sometime around 10:00 a.m. for a period of about 2 months. Tis the first time I felt murderous rage pump through my veins! And being a Bowie fan, I could never quite listen to "Under Pressure" the same again... /off subject
• sugarmilktea: That is *awesome!* The sister thing, not the "Ice Ice Baby" thing. The "Ice Ice Baby thing is... *shudder*
• I don't accept that law of large numbers shit. With 3500+ members on this site, it's almost inevitable that someone would say that.
• With 3500+ members on this site, it's almost inevitable that Chy would say that.
• This probably seems crazy, but I think of coincidences as the universe's way of telling me that things are on track. The more coincidences that I experience in a given period of time, the more confident I am that things are as they should be. It's sort of like a cosmic-wheels-aligning sort of thing. at On preview: What's up with the preview? It used to appear at the bottom of the page. Now it's at the top. What's up with that? I go away for a while, and this happens? Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?
• What happened there? The 'at' was originally some incredibly (if somewhat uncharacteristic) riff on the meaning of life. As you can see, it's now just an 'at'.
• coincidence?
• I think not!
• I had the misfortune of living across from someone in 1990/91 that blared Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" repeatedly beginning at 7:30 a.m. and ending sometime around 10:00 a.m. for a period of about 2 months. *turns beet red*
• Years ago I was dating a woman as she was having a psychotic episode (OK, that happened with more than one, but that's a different story). I was with her the morning that it began, in a store where I was facing a big window onto a busy street. I said that she seemed frightened, and asked about it, and she said: "You want to see fear, look!" and pointed to the window behind her, which she couldn't see and hadn't been near. Just then the view was obscured by an Army tank on a flatbed stopped at the traffic light. No reflections, no way to have seen it, not a military base within 50 miles. She's OK now, BTW.
• The list is amusing, if somewhat unverifiable. The last entry about linguistic coincidences is absolute nonsense. It's the sort of gibberish that has given linguistics a terrible reputation in the sciences. Sorry, this is a personal (and professional) pet peeve.
• You scared me for a moment B B Finnegan... And what you said tensor. When I saw the linguistic coincidences at the end of that list, I thought it was a lame attempt at grasping straws.
• I think most of these can be explained by the law of lying bullshitters.
• Damn! I was gonna post this exact same fpp!
• I was gonna post this exact same fpp! That's incredible!
• My butt is....my butt! Oh, man some serious trippin' here.