10 Amazing Coincidences (And Why They're Not That Amazing Really) | Random Thursday

most of us live fairly mundane lives we wake up in the same bed every day we go to the same job every dayi generally the same food every day and end every day in the same bed that we woke up in we get used to these patterns we come to expect things to happen in a certain way it's how we make sense of the world and our place in it but from time to time something crazy happens or you hear about something crazy happens it just seems impossible like you hear these stories all the time about somebody that you know has a dream about a loved one or somebody that they hadn't thought about in years and then the next day they find out that that person died overnight or died the previous day and you hear stuff like that and it's just like that seems impossible like how could something like that just happen by chance but is it impossible or do we just not understand probability very well today we're gonna take a look at ten amazing coincidences and just ask ourselves is there something else going on here our ancestors lived in a world of magic and mysticism where everything could be explained away by the actions of gods or demons where there were no coincidences they of course we have a much better understanding of how the world works but we're still not immune to magical thinking because sometimes crazy things happen that are really difficult to explain away with logic as these 10 stories show number one are you sure we're not the same person ever seeing somebody that looks just like you King Umberto the first of Italy did he was dining in a restaurant when he noticed that the owner looked quite a bit like him so he got started talking to him and found out there were a lot of other things ahead in common they were both born on March 14th 1844 in the same town they each married a woman named margarita the restaurant owner even opened his business on the same day that Umberto was crowned kind of freaky but then on July 29th in 1900 Umberto learned that the restaurant owner had been killed by a gunshot in a mysterious accident and later that same day Umberto was killed by a stranger in the crowd while walking through the city of Mons oh by the way protip if somebody is living a parallel life two years and you find out that they died just stay home that day number two two girls one balloon so King Umberto had his doppelganger so did Laura Buxton Laura Buxton was a 10 year old girl living in Staffordshire England in 2001 and she wanted to do a little experiment she tied a little piece of paper to a helium balloon with her and her address on it and she set it aloft just to just to see where it would land kind of like a message in a bottle but with helium the balloon floated 140 miles and landed in the backyard of another ten-year-old girl also named Laura Buxton two girls decided to meet and when they did they were kind of wearing the same outfit a pink shirt and jeans and then it kept getting weirder they both had the exact same hairstyle they were both the same height and they both had the exact same pets a gray rabbit a black lab and a guinea pig at that point I think I would almost wish I hadn't met this other person that's just that's just too creepy number three return to childhood Jonah's book author and parish was traveling in Paris France in the 1920s and took a stop at a bookstore and while there she ran across a book called Jack Frost and other stories which was her favorite book when she was a child so and have fitted nostalgia she decided to buy it later around that day her husband was looking through the book noticed that the previous owner some kid had written their address and on the inside of the front cover and that address read and perish 209 North Weber Street Colorado Springs it was the book she had when she was a kid a book that somehow made its way into Paris somehow wound up on that bookshelf that she just happened to go to and happen to walk past and see it my bet is she never got rid of it again number four no place like home here's another interesting coincidence involving a writer so in the movie The Wizard of Oz the wizard was played by a guy named Frank Morgan and he actually played a few different roles in that movie he played a cab driver and he played a fortune-teller as well and for the fortune teller character the costume department wanted a jacket that was kind of old and torn and tattered so they went to a secondhand shop and found one that fit in there so during filming Morgan turned out the inside of one of his pockets and noticed that the previous owner had written their name in it in that previous owner's name was elf frank Baum in that crazy they were both named Frank Oh an elf frank Baum also wrote The Wizard of Oz Frank Morgan thought it was just a joke that the costume department had played on him but he actually tracked down Alf frank Baum's Widow who actually spoke to his tailor and found out no this was actually his jacket from way back in the day number 5 you sunk my battleship back during World War one hundreds of British civilian vessels were transformed into military ships and one of them that was done that way was the RMS car mania but in order to confuse the enemy and maybe to sneak past it was actually disguised as a German ship specifically a German ship called the SMS Trafalgar so in 1914 the car mania saw some action off the coast of Brazil and they sunk a German ship the name of that German ship the SMS Trafalgar even weirder is that the Germans kind of did a similar thing they disguised some of their ships to look like British ships and the Trafalgar was disguised to look like a British ship which British ships specifically the RMS car mania imagine you're on the car mania disguised as the Trafalgar watching the Trafalgar sink while disguised as the car mania it's kind of like watching your own ship go down it's kind of a nightmare number six who's for dinner Edgar Allan Poe is known worldwide as the master of horror and macabre but most of the works that he did were actually short stories and poems he only published one full-length novel his entire life it was published in 1838 and it was titled the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and part of its plot involves four shipwrecked sailors who have to resort to cannibalism to survive so they actually eat one of the cabin boys and the name of that cabin boy is Richard Parker what a pose more heartwarming and life-affirming stories flash-forward fifty years to 1884 in a real-life ship named the mignonette crashed off the coast of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and in this crash there were four survivors that lived on a lifeboat and had to resort to eating a cabin boy and the name of that cabin boy you guessed it was Richard Parker this event actually led to a really big trial in England that outlawed survival cannibalism so if your name is Richard Parker you can rest easy now number seven death by eating here's another one about eating and death so much eating and death in the coincidence world dine a new tois was a South African astronomer who was giving a talk in 1981 and part of his talk was about how death can come for anybody at any time you know like astronomers usually talk about anyway after the lecture he popped a mint into his mouth a mint that then slid down the back of his throat went on to choke him to death and he died right there in front of the lectern let's just be glad he didn't give a talk about comet impacts number eight bond James Bond that's was just kind of fun 1990 a student at Argo in high school was taking his General Certificate of Secondary and the number at the top of his little sheet that marked which one was his was 0:07 the name of this student James Bond I bet he was shaken by that but not stirred number 9 plum pudding as a teenager the French poet Emil Duchamp was introduced to a certain dessert called plum pudding and the guy who introduced him to it was an Englishman named Monsieur de fuga bu how does the English guys sound more French than the French guy and I guess he liked it because 10 years later deshaun was in Paris and they walked past a patisserie and they had plum pudding in the window and he said that looks good so he stepped in to have a bite but when he orders it he is disappointed to find out that they are actually out they just sold their last piece to a gentleman in the back corner the shop looks across the room and lo and behold its most sure that if I could be just pounding that plum pudding quick note there's no way I'm saying that name right sorry anyway that's a neat coincidence but it actually happens again so several years later Duchamp is at this party and they're serving plum pudding and I'm guessing that plum pudding is not that popular it's a fairly rare dessert or something because when he sees this the first thing that he says if somebody is oh I bet most you'd to português around and somebody was like what the hell does that mean he's like well I gotta explain this whole story so he explained the whole story as a joke and they're like haha horse oh you're so funny to show off and then they look at the door and look who walks in so 240p walks in he's actually not even at the right party he meant to go to a different dinner party but I guess he just has like spidey sense about plum pudding and he just had to walk in and number 10 Eleanor Rigby Eleanor Rigby obviously is a classic songs one of the best Beatles songs out there it was written by Paul McCartney and he claimed that he named it after Eleanor brought an actress at the time they say that the Rigby part of the name came from a store in Bristol called Rigby and Evans however in the 1980s somebody pointed out a coincidence about this name that even made Paul McCartney think twice about it because there's a grave in a cemetery outside of st. Peter's parish church in Liverpool that is marked with the name Eleanor Rigby a woman who died in 19 and of course any Beatles fan can tell you that they're from Liverpool that's why they have those Liverpudlian accents and John and Paul actually used to hang out at this particular Cemetery when they were teenagers now Paul McCartney claims to have no specific memory of this headstone but even he admits that you know it could have just been like a subconscious things now of course these are just 10 out of countless numbers of amazing coincidences out there if you have a favorite one that I didn't list here feel free to talk about in the comments below there's like a dozen of them just around Kennedy and Lincoln alone but that's kind of the whole point of this video crazy unbelievable coincidences actually happen all the time we are all one of 7 billion people on this planet and we all live a very singular experience in our lives we don't see the whole system working and we don't see all the variables but when you take a step back and look at the entire system you can realize that actually all of these can be explained away with math and probability as an example let's look at that and perish coincidence as I mentioned earlier you can find a mathematical explanation of this story in the book flute the math and myth of coincidence by Joseph Missouri he writes that the likelihood that an would be traveling to Paris in the summer of 1929 is about point one she happened to be married to an industrialist in Paris with one of the most popular destinations for Americans in the 1920s she's also a writer so the likelihood that she would go to a bookstore is not that low is 0.3 he says the hardest number to land on is how exactly her childhood book would wind up in that bookstore in Paris but it turns out Anne's mother was friends with a painter named Mary Cassatt and she probably passed the book on to her and like many painters and artists Mary moved to Paris and when she died there her estate doled out her books to the english-speaking bookstores around there and of course and being an English speaker from America was in english-speaking bookstores so Missouri actually gives that like look at a point zero one he writes so the possibility of such a story happening will be something like p equals zero point one times zero point three times zero point one equals zero point zero zero zero three in other words the odds of it happening are 3331 to one now that sounds like crazy odds but according to Missouri it's actually a little bit better than the odds of somebody getting dealt at four of a kind in poker now granted that's rare but it happens if you look at a probability distribution chart you can imagine that most things fall in this middle 90% range but out here on the edges you could thin out all the way to a point zero zero zero one percent probability event one thousandth of 1% probability that's pretty damn small but in a system of seven billion people that's still seven thousand events so the likelihood of it actually happening to you might be really small but the likelihood of it happening to someone it's actually pretty good so you can imagine everyday these random crazy coincidences are happening to various people all around the world which is kind of landing on different people and to each one of those specific people it feels like a statistical miracle but it's actually happening all the time at the beginning of this video I talked about that whole you have a dream about somebody and then you find out that they died kind of thing and no doubt that's as freaky as it gets I mean if something like that happened to me I would just defecate but let's just let's just break all that down real quick we all dream every night so the likelihood that somebody is having a dream is pretty much 100% and we often dream of loved ones and friends and people that we have known at some point in our life because that person has to come from somewhere you know in our memory banks so the chance of having a dream about somebody that you know is pretty high and people die every day more than 150,000 people die every day around the world and each one of those people have dozens maybe hundreds of close friends family acquaintances that may have had a dream the night before and may have had a dream about them so statistically it's pretty obvious that this should happen pretty much all the time but when it happens to us it feels like a statistical miracle our brains need to assign meaning to things we are pattern recognition machines and when things fall outside those expected patterns we need some kind of explanation to explain why it happened some hidden force pulling the strings when in reality all we're experiencing is totally normal randomness that exists in a extremely large and chaotic system some people hate this idea because they want there to be something that's in charge some hidden guiding force that's you know making these things happen that's comforting it makes them feel connected to something bigger than themselves but to me anyway that's exactly what's so beautiful this if we were actually living isolated lives and bubbles and not interacting with some bigger system these kinds of crazy coincidences would never occur we've never experienced that but we do we are a small part of a massive system of humanity random and chaotic sure but also interconnected and important crazy coincidences like this remind us that we're not alone that we're part of something bigger and that we have agency that we can make things better by taking care of each other and to me that is what's truly amazing all right thanks a lot for watching again if you have some kind of crazy coincidence you've lived through I would love to hear about it down in the comments if this is your first time here I invite you to check out this video Google thinks you'll like that or any of my others and if you like them I invite you to subscribe because I come back on videos every Monday and every Thursday all right you guys go out now and have an eye-opening rest of the week and I'll see ya Monday oh you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 845,678

Rating: 4.9181752 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, random thursday, edgar allan poe, strange coincidences, amazing coincidences, probability, chaos theory, emile deschamps, Umberto 1st, the beatles, eleanor rigby, wizard of oz, l frank baum, RMS Carmania, Joseph Mazur

Id: NUZL_sUCZFY

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019