Here we go again…
Happy birthday to me. And Harry and Rickie. And Will, who also used to be in the quant team. What a remarkable coincidence that 3 of us currently in the quant team – together with another quant who has since left – each have our birthday on the 11th November. But as I discussed in a post around this time last year as well as at a previous offsite, there are so many possible combinations of three or four people in the company that could have a shared birthday, that it’s not that very surprising that one combination does. It just happened to be me, Harry, Rickie and Will on 11/11.
And on the subject of coincidences…
You may have heard of an app called what3words. This is a location app for ios or android which divides the entire globe into 3 x 3 metre squares and assigns 3 words to each square. For example, currently sitting at my desk in the Smartodds office, the 3 allocated words are “insert”, “falls”, “opens”. The idea is that in an emergency I can identify and communicate my unique position to the relevant emergency services by means of just these 3 words. Of course, I could do the same thing with my GPS coordinates, but the point is that standard words are easier to read and communicate in a hurry. And there are already a number of instances in which lives have potentially been saved through use of the app.
And the coincidence? Well, I opened the app in my house the other day with this result:
… and, here in a recent Halloween pic with my Grandson, is my Granddaughter…
… the charmingly awesome Poppy!
Footnote: writing this now, I’m reminded that some time ago, as a follow-up to a post which also discussed coincidences, Richard mailed me about an experience he’d recently had. He described it as follows:
I was listening to the radio one morning, and the presenter mentioned “French windows”. I wasn’t sure at the time what they were, and remember amusing myself as to what made them French exactly – perhaps they come with a beret on top etc…anyway, an hour later, I was watching Frasier over my cornflakes and there was a joke/reference to French windows!
Like the shared birthdays, if you tried to calculate the chance of the mentioning of French windows on both the radio and an episode of Frasier within a short time of one another, the probability would be incredibly remote. But again, we experience so many opportunities for coincidences every day, that although the vast majority don’t happen, one or two inevitably do. And they’re the ones we remember and sometimes ascribe to ‘fate’, ‘destiny’, ‘karma’ etc etc. When in fact it’s just the laws of probability playing out in our daily lives.
Anyway, Richard suggested that an idea for a blog post would be collect and collate ‘coincidences’ of the kind I’ve described here – my experience with what3words; Richard’s with French windows. So, if you’ve recently had, or have in the near future, a coincidental experience of some sort, please send it to me and I’ll include it in a future post.
