Man. Myth. Morland.: Fate accompli

The book also has a good chapter on "Amazing Coincidences." These are strange events which appear to give evidence of supernatural influences operating in everyday life. They are not the result of deliberate fraud or trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often. A simple way to state the paradox is Littlewood's Law of Miracles. Littlewood was a famous mathematician who was teaching at Cambridge University when I was a student. Being a professional mathematician, he defined miracles precisely before stat-ing his law about them. He defined a miracle as an event that has special significance when it occurs, but oc-curs with a probability of one in a million. This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word "miracle."

Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood's Law.

I've been thinking about this lately. I'd just begun reading an edition of a book brandishing a fawning quote by Michiko Kakutani on its cover the day her father died, and not just any book, but one preoccupied with exactly the sort of mathematical exercises and puzzles Shizuo Kakutani devoured his whole life. It was a provocative coincidence.

A few weeks prior, I'd been poking around on IMDB only to find that one of the child costars from an obscure movie I'd vaguely recalled seeing over a decade ago was now the lead singer of a band to which I'd only recently started to listen. Had my IMDB time-killing occurred a mere fortnight earlier, or my introduction to the band a couple of weeks later, the connection would have passed me by.

A month or two before that, I'd chanced upon an acquaintance from college on a street nearby my apartment after not having seen him for over three years. The next day I bumped into him again in an entirely different neighborhood, also without its being planned. While this might have been unusual if he were a fellow NYC resident, it crossed over into the realm of cosmically improbable when I learned he was living in Washington DC at the time, and only visiting for the weekend (the very two same days we'd seen each other).

This last example lent credence to an idea I'd been mulling over for some time, but reading Dyson's review today pushed me over the edge. These coincidences are as inevitable as they are unpredictable, and documenting them might prove to be a fun endeavor. Noting some random quote or bit of obscurely intersected knowledge would be of little interest to others, but maybe not so with recording these lucky run-ins, if only because I could include a goofy picture. So be it. Henceforth, I will attempt to capture them in accordance with some basic, but discretionary, rules:

I'm pretty sure that you're just allowing yourself to stalk people now. This blog entry is now a convenient cover story.

MW (a.k.a. DD): Oh, Morland! What are you doing in Washington?
M: MW? Holy crap! I had no idea you lived here!
MW (a.k.a. DD): What are you talking about? You've been staring in my window and prank calling me for the last 17 hours.
M: (realizing cover is blown, yet will never give in) Jeez, it's almost a miracle. You see, a man wrote in this book...
MW (a.k.a. DD): Stay the hell away from me and my wiener dog, Morland.

the guy who just fixed my computer turned out to be my mom's college roommate's husband's brother.