Coincidences

Brief IM log snippet:

(10:20:50 AM) David: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obIGsb-IZMo&feature=user
(10:22:11 AM) Petter: I paused my music to check that out.
(10:22:28 AM) Petter: In a rather amusing coincidence, the song I paused was a song by Tom Lehrer called "New Math".
(10:22:40 AM) David: wow, what are the odds? ;)
(10:23:10 AM) Petter: Probably inversely proportional to the frequency with which such remarkable coincidences happen to me.

Other peculiar coincidences of my life:

• 
  At a lake, swimming with a friend; we see a column of smoke rising from nearby and make jokes along the lines of I guess I shouldn't have planted that car bomb (yeah, yeah; we were about fourteen). Heading home, we pass the source of the smoke; the burning wreck of a car.
  
• 
  The weirdest one: Playing a role playing game with a friend (same friend, incidentally). The setting is a sci fi one; the game…kind of superhero-ish, a bit like Batman with a lot more guns. Having broken up some crime or other, the hero fires a few rounds into the air to attract the attention of the authorities as he makes his sortie. You accidentally shoot out a streetlight, I declare. Annoyed, he says something to the effect of Oh, come on!, then falls silent as the light bulb in my desk lamp cracks.
• 
  This is the only time in my life I've seen a light bulb do that; I guess thermal expansion and contraction had slowly worked microscopic cracks to the point where most of the glass bulb fell off and shattered on the desk, leaving the screw-in part in the socket, adorned with some jagged pieces of glass.
  

Remarkable coincidences like these seem to tempt some people to commit superstition. Me, I like to wonder the following: What are the odds that anyone should go through life without running into at least a few remarkable coincidences? After all, every single day, every one of us experiences many hundred events (using the term loosely), for a grand total of millions of events over a lifetime. On average, therefore, a person should expect to run into at least a couple of coincidences that are literally one in a million rare; coincidences that are one in a thousand, meanwhile, are a dime a dozen—you'll go through thousands of them. Or, in one of my favoite self-coined phrases, Every single day, on Earth, there are half a dozen people having a one-in-a-billion kind of day.

For a more thorough (but very accessible) discussion of this sort of thing, read Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow, in particular chapter 7, Unweaving the Uncanny.