So, it was one of those kind of bars.

No mention of the elephant around the next corner. It must have gotten tired of waiting on the road and wandered off.

Logicians will understand what I mean. Sometimes you miss the moose and hit the bear, but you'll never know about the elephant you missed altogether. Humans constantly muck up calculations of probability by leaving things out. Like all the other ways that something seemingly miraculous or ridiculously improbable could nappen.

Once I was rewinding a tape of TV shows and for a lark stopped at 3: 14: 16, which is, of course, approximately "pi". At that point on the tape, was Homer Simpson saying the word "pie". The pi/pie coincidence is striking, given the number of words there are in the English language (over 1,000,000 counting technical terms like "pi") but the real story is the number of times you do such things without a coincidence and the number of possible coincidences there are. You don't notice or remember "non-coincidences", which are innumerable, nor do you think of the number of possible coincidences, or Black Swans, if you willl that you miss altogether. But when one of these black swans shows up, IT'S FARKING AMAZING!

There must be a God if a small child walks away from a plane crash. Except for the 368 people who died violent and painful deaths, of course. For them, there is NO God today.

John Allen Paulos correctly pointed out that my "coincidence" should not be seen in terms of how unlike it is, but in terms of how likely all the other coincidences that are the same as it are.

You'll never replicate my coincidence, but you'll have millions of your own, and not a single one of them is a miracle. They all happen within the bounds of probability, randomness or chance. They just LOOK FARKING COOL!

Yeah, baby!

By concidence, there's another new thread on Fark right now about a Nassim Nicholas Taleb article on chance in investment circles. It's worth a look. I like NNT. He's a sensible guy. Thinks just like my boss who is also from West Asia and who is also an economist. Taleb is from a wealthy and distinguished family in Lebanon. Maybe the Phoenecian ancestry steers a guy towards economic thinking. There's a sort of "can do" attitude in West Asia that is very like the "American Can-Do Spirit". They never say we don't have that ("Cela n'existe pas", as a French shopkeeper or clerk will say, "That does not exist.") or we can't do that. They will always make a deal. "We can't do that exactly, but we can do this, this and this." Like Harrod's they claim to have everything or to be able to get it for you if they don't.

My boss never thinks in terms of "this is the job we must do, even at the cost of doing it badly". He always thinks in terms of "we have the time and the resources to do this but not that, so we will do this and forget about that". Very like an economist. If you know Scott Adams from his website and cartoons, you have an idea of how engineers and economists think. He's very like an economist despite not having the formal background. In fact, he has worked in both engineering and financial/banking cubicles and he comes by his usual thinking and quirks honestly, as I always say"

Snowflake Tubbybottom: Why did the bear hit the moose?

Because it was there.