For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By T6Harvard
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1885994
I am always surprised when presented with the stat about the high probability of sharing a birthday with someone else at a gathering (if anyone remembers those) .

We had a fun evening when a friend and MrT6 realised they shared the same day and year of birth.
They were born in different time zones but a quick calculation of UTC indicated they were approx 8hrs apart.

The fun bit? Well one is a white 6' tall bloke, the other is a (self described) black Caribbean 6'4' tall bloke, and they paraded around the Christmas party, arm in arm, telling everyone they were twins. Of course the times of birth got closer and closer as the story got re-told and now they often claim to have been born 'at exactly the same time' :mrgreen:
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By PeteSpencer
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1885997
In the eighties we befriended four other couples largely through school gates meetings :/children similar age and became quite a close group .

It turned out that all ten of us had birth dates of either the 5th or 22nd of the month.

Many group dinners/ pi ss-ups took place throughout eighties/ early nineties before we started drifting away …, :roll:
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By FlightDek
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1886038
I grew up in N Ireland but haven't lived there for 25 years. My parents still live there so I flew in to Causeway airfield a couple of years ago. Turns out the guy running the airfield is married to an ex-girlfriend. I last saw her in about 1992
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By JAFO
#1886055
It is estimated that we may meet or otherwise interact with 80,000 people in our lives, it's hardly surprising that we might bump into them again.

If each of those 80,000 meet 80,000 then that means that we are talking about 6.4 billion people so the chances of meeting someone who knew someone you knew are so high that we should remark on it if the person you meet doesn't know someone else you've previously met.
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By lobstaboy
#1886076
If you assume 25 years is one generation and there is perfect mixing of the population each time a mate is selected (a shaky assumption I admit) then you only have to trace your ancestors back to about 1700 to find you are related to everyone else in the UK.
Not a nice thought at all, present company excepted :)
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By lobstaboy
#1886077
JAFO wrote:It is estimated that we may meet or otherwise interact with 80,000 people in our lives, it's hardly surprising that we might bump into them again.

If each of those 80,000 meet 80,000 then that means that we are talking about 6.4 billion people so the chances of meeting someone who knew someone you knew are so high that we should remark on it if the person you meet doesn't know someone else you've previously met.


Yeah but I'd get a bit bored listening to them list 80,000 names...
(It's a bit like searching a certain well known social media site for a specific name - there are hundreds of people called JAFO!)
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By akg1486
#1886083
T6Harvard wrote:I am always surprised when presented with the stat about the high probability of sharing a birthday with someone else at a gathering (if anyone remembers those) .

If you have a group of 23 people, and with no advance knowledge of their birthdays, there's a better than 50-50 chance that at least two of them share a birthday. (The special case of 29 February not included, but I don't think that affects the odds much.)
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By CloudHound
#1886094
I read many years ago of a chap on a day off from his work in London walking along the seafront at Brighton.

A public telephone started to ring so for a laugh he picked up the handset and said hello.

To his and the callers shock it was his secretary who had actually misdialled a customer’s number.
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By akg1486
#1886225
Paultheparaglider wrote:By an amazing coincidence, today is 2021, December 2nd.

20211202.

A palindrome.

Just over a week ago, there was even a palindromic moment:

2021-11-22 11:12:02

And there will be again just over a week from now:

2021-12-11 21:12:02

As for amazing coincidences, everybody knows that they are signs of glitches in the software that runs the simulation that we perceive as reality. It's true: I read it on the Internet. :D
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By kanga
#1886342
lobstaboy wrote:.. you only have to trace your ancestors back to about 1700 to find you are related to everyone else in the UK...


Several years ago my late mother was contacted out of the blue by a previously unknown distant cousin (on her father's side; her mother was of recent immigrant stock). Cousin had got into genealogy research as this became easier in the early days of the internet. He was able to tell her that through different lineages she was descended from mediaeval royalty of both England [sic] and France. She (with her immigrant background, brought up by her mother alone after early death of father) got very excited, as she'd often felt that she was treated as an outsider by other Brits.

I started to try gently to point out that statistically it was highly likely that most Brits with forebears in British Isles a few centuries ago had similar Royal connexions. But I didn't want wholly to deflate her excitement :)
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By JAFO
#1886350
@kanga - I was contacted by a cousin doing genealogy research back in the mid-90s. She and another cousin were just calling everyone with our surname in the UK phone books. That wasn't too many.

Since then, I have learnt a lot about my forebears but can say that I appear to be peasant stock through and through.
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