Archive for February, 2015


Clear as Glass

(Submitted by Skepticality listener  Bill Walker.)

Hi, I am a contractor in New Jersey. I recently ordered 14 windows for a job. They only had 11 of the windows in stock so I agreed to accept the 11 and get the other 3 when they became available.

A few days later when the 11 windows were delivered to the jobsite I paid for them with my business credit card. They completed the transaction by having the driver call the home office and give them my credit card information. The driver gave the secretary the 6 digit total for the windows and then proceeded to give her my credit card number.

Business & Finance

As he was giving her the credit card number I heard her stop him before he finished so I asked what was wrong. It turns out that the first 6 numbers of my credit card were the exact same 6 numbers, in the same order, as the total for the delivery. She thought he was giving her the total again. And since my card grouped the first 4 numbers together there was even a space where the decimal in the total is located.

I would be interested in knowing what the odds of that happening might be. Even throwing aside the fact that I didn’t receive the complete delivery and that I chose to use that particular card it must be a very rare event.

Business & Finance

I have recounted this story to a few friends since it has happened and, to a man, the response has been “You should play those numbers”. (in the NJ Pick 6 Lottery)

When my wife suggested that to me I responded by saying that of course I should play those numbers because the same super natural force that had created the coincidence was surely going to exert it’s powers over the lottery for me too. I didn’t play the numbers.

It’s easy to see how someone who has a tendency to believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence and everything that happens has meaning would assign special significance to an event like this. And apparently even for people who seems completely rational their first response was to suggest that the numbers on my credit card and a receipt for some windows could somehow influence the outcome of a lottery.

Hopefully I won’t fall into that trap. Knock on wood.


Below are the extended notes provided by contributing editor Mark Gouch for use in Skepticality Episode 248. Mark is a wastewater treatment system operator and engineer living in Smithtown, NY (Long Island). He started to become interested in coincidences after recognizing the series of events that conspired to get him employment on Long Island many years ago. Two of Mark’s recommended books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, and “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives” by Shankar Vedantam.

Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary.

We’re sure it must have been at first a confusing, then a weird experience to realize that the sequence of numbers in your credit card matched the sequence of numbers in the cost for the windows. Determining the probability of this happening seems to be a pretty straightforward process. Bill also asked a few related questions that are interesting.

First of all, Bill did not mention the cost of the individual windows. Assuming they cost somewhere in the range of $120 to $500 each (based on a quick web search for single hung windows), the range of costs would be from $1,320 to $7,000. The low number in the range is estimated using the low range of cost of windows and only 11 being available. The high end of the range is estimated using the high range of the unit cost and assumes all 14 windows were available. Almost forgot this: If we assume NJ state tax of 6%, the maximum cost would be $7,420.00. This demonstrates that regardless of whether 11 or 14 windows were available, the cost would be less than $ 9,999.99, so the cost including pennies will contain six digits (Thousands, hundreds, tens, and dollars, and two decimal, or cents digits). Therefore, the fact that only 11 were available does not change anything in the probability estimate. Anything we determine is true for 11 windows available, will be true for the case of 14. We will still be talking about a series of 6 digits. Make sense?

So the question is what is the probability of a six digit series of numbers matching a different series of six digits. The possible range of six digits is 000000 to 999999. (Writing it as either digits with commas or using dollar figures makes it easier to see there are six digits). So there are one million possible sequences of numbers of six digits. And the odds would be 1 in 1,000,000, one in a million.

Now considering how many thousands of contractors there are, and how many pay for supplies in the same cost range with credit cards would be tough to estimate. But it is reasonable to expect that there are well over one million such purchases in the U.S. annually. So this probably happens at least once a year in the U.S., and probably much more often than that.

Bill mentioned the decimal point in the cost matched up to a space in the sequence of digits on the credit card. This seemed like an addition to the coincidence. He did not mention the lack of a space in the card sequence where the comma would be in the cost, which, if you consider a space in the place where the decimal was to be noteworthy, one would assume you would think that the lack of a space where the comma would be to be noteworthy also. This may be a case as Dr. Michael Shermer has pointed out many times that our brains “remember the hits and forget the misses.” But in general, we’re talking about a sequence of numbers, so let’s ignore the decimal point and comma. (Plus, in Europe they use decimals and commas in the opposite functions as we do, so thinking more globally, lets agree it is ok to ignore them.).

Now to the question of whether it is sound advice to suggest that based on this coincidence that it would be wise to purchase a lottery ticket with the same sequence of numbers. It would not. In probability these are referred to as independent events. What the sequence of numbers in a credit card number and/or an invoice amount are, will have absolutely no effect on the random numbers generated by a lottery ticket. The odds will be the same for your lottery number. But if that series of numbers were to win the lottery for you, you’d have a heck of a story to tell. It would still only be a coincidence, but a good story. So if you want to choose the same numbers for a lottery, do it for fun, but don’t do it expecting any advantage or disadvantage in your odds of winning the lottery.

Lastly, the question of whether some supernatural entity had an impact on the coincidence. Bill offered no evidence for the existence of, or the potential observed impact of a supernatural entity on the coincidence or any other event that has occurred in the real world. So it would be impossible to estimate the odds of that. We are skeptical enough to demand evidence.

Three Trendies

(Submitted by Skepticality listener Michael McClure.)

I’ve been working at Disney Animation now for more than 18 years. My son was 11 months old when I started my career at the mouse. He’s now a 19 year old sophomore in college.

We were working on Tarzan a year or so after I started at Disney Animation. I got to know the Artistic Coordinator on the show, a fellow Scot musician named Fraser. One morning he called Support (where I was working at the time), so I took the ticket and went to see him. I had brought in some of my slides in a sleeve (16 slides per sleeve) a few days earlier, because I had a shot of the composer on Tarzan, one Phil Collins. However, instead of the short-haired, balding Phil of the early ’80s, my shot was from a Genesis gig in 1977 at the San Diego Sports Arena, with hirsute Phil (long hair, beard and all!) decked out in the jersey of the farm hockey team from the town that he threw on for the band’s encore of the evening, singing his heart out in a pool of red light. I’d shot the picture 20 years prior, and of course hippie Phil would be relatively unrecognizable to most folks in the late ’90s. The Tarzan production admin folks put out a printed newsletter each week containing the goings on in production-land, and I thought it would be fun to put this picture of Phil into the newsletter, to see if anyone could guess who it was.

HairyPhil

Phil Collins, San Diego Sports Arena, 1977 Genesis Concert

I brought the sleeve of slides with me to Fraser’s office, I pulled out the slides to show to him, to see if maybe my musical brethren could guess who the hairy man in the slide was.

Fraser held the sleeve up to the light, and he pondered the picture of Phil for a moment, but I saw his glance drift to one of the other slides in the sleeve. Fraser couldn’t guess who it was, and was amazed when I told him that it was a picture of Phil Collins, but he kept looking at a different slide in the sleeve. Finally, Fraser said, “Can I pull this slide out?” pointing at some random slide I had in the sleeve along with my Genesis concert pictures. I said sure, and he pulled out a picture I’d shot of some random people along Princes Street in Edinburgh, Scotland when I was there with the California Repertory Theater in the summer of 1980 for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a huge, yearly theatrical festival held in the city. Fraser inspected the slide very closely, and then looked me in the eye, and said, “This is my best friend Graham.”

“What? Really?”

“Yes. No doubt about it. This is Graham.”

3trendies

“3 trendies”

Well, that was stunning right there. The picture, as you can tell, shows three trendies (as I wrote on the edge of the slide) whom I stopped on the street that sunny day in August of 1981, and asked in my California twang if I could take their picture. The girls were fine with it, but the boy in the shot was huffy. I think he was annoyed by this ‘foreigner’ bothering them, and showed that by being annoyed and petulant in the picture (but, he was still in the picture!).

SlideSheet

The sheet of slides, showing where the two pictures were located.

HairyPhilSlide

The “P. Collins” slide

3trendiesSlide (1)

The “3 trendies” slide (dated SEP 80).

Fraser and I had a great can-you-believe-it moment about this, a good laugh, and then we went about our day.

Within 20 minutes, Fraser had called back down to my offices, asking for me. I went back to his office, where I found him, looking even more stunned. After seeing this now 16 or 17 year old picture of his Best Friend, shot by his Support Guy at Disney Animation, he just had to call Graham to tell him about it. So, he did. And things got REALLY weird.

Graham apparently picked up his phone and said hello to Fraser. Fraser explained about the photo, and Graham shrieked in his ear on the phone and hung up. I mean, Fraser said he really SHRIEKED at him, and then abruptly hung the phone up. That was it.

So, Fraser called him back.

Fraser got Graham back on the line, and after a few moments, he drew the story of the shriek and the ensuing hang up out of him. Graham was completely beside himself the entire time they were on the phone. But, in the end, it made perfect sense.

Graham told Fraser that just a few hours earlier THAT SAME DAY, he had had a conversation with his old friend — let’s call her Carol — the small brunette in my photograph. He was attempting to refresh her memory of their other friend — let’s call her Alice — the blonde in the picture. But, Carol wasn’t remembering her. She couldn’t quite place her. Apparently Alice had left Scotland not too long after I’d taken the picture of the three of them in Edinburgh, to marry the bass player of the Bay City Rollers, a then very popular pop group/boy band. She’d gone all the way to New Jersey to marry this guy, apparently. In any case, Graham was trying to remind Carol of this other girl Alice, when he said something to the effect of, “Do you remember when that Yank stopped us on Princes Street years ago and took a picture of the three of us?” hoping that would jar her memory. Maybe it did, or maybe it didn’t — I don’t remember that part. But, Graham hung up with Carol eventually, and then Fraser rung him up from the States soon after that call and said over the staticky international land line, “You’re not going to believe the picture I just saw of you and two girls on Princes Street from the summer of 1981…”

I think I would shriek, too.


Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 247.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog.

There are some factors that increase the probability that Fraser would recognize someone in one of the pictures, namely the shared interest in a genre of music and probably the artist. However, it’s a pretty amazing and impressive event. I’ll add that if I was in Graham’s shoes, I would probably shriek, too. These things are bound to happen from time-to-time, of course, so there’s nothing supernatural about it, but that wouldn’t keep my jaw from hitting the floor if this had happened to me.