Scary Lampposts

[fluffymark]

Maybe it's just me. Or maybe they really don't like me. I was walking under the lamppost at the end of my street on my way home just now, and just as I passed underneath - *pow* - it goes out. Now it could be a coincidence, but it's happened few times before with that lamppost, and I'm beginning to think it hates me. There was also a similar lamppost on Jesus Lane in Cambridge that was worse - I could guarantee turning off that lamppost just by walking underneath it. Every time - *pow* - it went out. Anyone have any clues why this happens? *paranoid*

Aside from the scary lamppost business I've had a fun evening out. At 5pm I escaped form the office and walked to the perfume shop in aldgate where Doseybat now works, and it's really nice there - I'd even find genuine reasons to shop there. Yay! At 6 she got off work and we both headed to the Virgin Megastore to find Tristan and Mandy who were watching the Von Bondies play there, but they weren't letting anyone else in (meanies!), so we had to wait. Eventually, got to meet Mandy again (it's been years! Ack!) but only briefly. I then headed to the Intrepid fox for free food and an Emily. Yay! :)

*very* tired now. Time for beddy byes. zzzzzzzzz

Comments

[yvesilena.livejournal.com]

OK, it could be perfectly explicable - I know there used to be a light on Silver Street that was somehow rigged to go out when people walked underneath it. However, I know I was pretty impressed by the whole you/Jesus Lane lamppost thing at the time, as that one didn't seem to work for everyone else... I'm thinking it might be that you have a really weird electromagnetic field, or something. I know that generally the weirder people are the more likely it seems they are to set off random electrical freakouts. Never had any trouble with lampposts myself, but *car alarms* on the other hand... and with Casby it's light bulbs, but only when he's scared.

Streetlamps

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

It's the Douglas Adams effect.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0330309552/

Lamps

[alektoeumenides.livejournal.com]

You're just strange. I vouch for the electromagnetic theory. So pray you never ever need a pacemaker, or odd things might begin to happen.

Sounds like you had a lovely evening though - yay, Emily's back! Hurrah! But how on earth did you manage free food?

DOH

scary lampposts and other bizarre coincidences

[(Anonymous)]

Everyone does this sort of coincidence spotting. It's because you only notice the times it does happen, you don't remember the times when it doesn't. Also, once you've noticed it happening once, next time you'll see it flicker out for a bit when you're half way down the street and think you did that. Like the way pessimistic people will tell you it's rained the whole summer, whilst I'll say it's been great weather and I've got the sunburn and the scars from falling down on concrete to prove it, whereas if you look at it, it probably rained a bit, but no more than usual, it just depends on which events you remember most.

Also, after a bit of thinking about probability it becomes obvious that one in a million chances happen all the time. For example it's probably a one in a million chance that my plant would have got blown off my desk at work by my fan, but it happened. It's pretty much inevitable that some incredibly unlikely event (such as lights going out) will happen to you, which you'll remember, whereas millions of other unlikely events won't have happened, but you won't know about any of them.

In naughty maths speak you've got P(event) = not very much, but for a pretty much infinite number of improbable events, P( event1 OR event2 OR event.....) is pretty close to 1 isn't it?

Given I'm in full on maths head mode and I'm well bored at work and cos I'm trying to get my cleverness back in case I need it to get a new job, here's the scary maths which I think is probably right but I'm not sure.

assuming each possible event Xn has the same (very small) probability - this is just a simplification, if you take this to be the minimum probability for all your events, you'll get a final probability that is equal to or less than the actual probability.

P(Xn) = p

P( X1 | X2 | ...|Xn ) = P[n]

P(!X1) * P[n-1] + P(X1)

= p + (1-p) * P[n-1]

P[1] = p

p + (1-p)p + (1-p)(1-p)p + ((1-p)^n)p

which if you have a large number for n always tends to 1

eg. if you've got 1000 events with a probability of 1 in a million, you've got a chance of 0.9995 that one of them will happen.

guess who.