Coincidences

I'm constantly reminded of how small the earth is. My last major experience of this was in a remote village in Africa, I came across someone wearing a Klompen Klassic t-shirt. For those of you who don't know, my hometown has a fun run with the same name every year and gives out t-shirts for the participants. Somehow, one managed to wind it's way out in the middle of no-where 8,000 miles away. That man gave me some kasava roots when I pointed at him and yelled.

Well, similar incidents have been happening in Korea.

Story #1
Before coming here, my mom had told me that she had a nurse friend who had a son here. I had emailed him once and thought nothing of it. A few weeks ago I saw him at a bus stop. It turns out, that this kid from Grinnel lives only 5 minutes from my apartment. In a city of 3.6 million and a country of 27 million, someone lives closer to me than here than if we were at home in America.

Story #2
Several weeks ago, Danny, Tane, and myself went to a scarecrow festival with one of Danny's teachers. While there, we were minor celebrities just because we were the only whities in attendance. So, we were given silly objects and asked to do goofy things and people would clap and take pictures of us.
A few weeks later we went to a fireworks festival. There was special seating for foreignors and we were ushered up to the front and sat down for a while. Some other people crowded around us and we started watching a show. After a little while, the girls next to me start nudging me and show me there camera. I see a picture of myself at the Scarecrow festival which is a 3 hour drive away. So through all that time and distance, they still managed to end up right next to us at an event that had almost a million people attending.

Story #3
My friend Emily came here recently. While still in Minneapolis, the maintenance man at her apartment building told her that his nephew was in the country. I'm sure you can guess what happens next. We decided to have a birthday party for Emily and Danny and we invited a few friends to join us. Danny had been emailing some of them because we hadn't seen them since orientation and they were coming as a surprise. Low and behold, one of them was the nephew that Emily had been told to look for. He was surprised and so was she.

So remember kids, by the law of probability, the unlikely is very likely to happen sometimes.

Fun Facts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox
In probability theory, the birthday problem, or birthday paradox pertains to the probability that in a set of randomly chosen people some pair of them will have the same birthday. In a group of 23 (or more) randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will both have been born on the same day. For 57 or more people, the probability is more than 99%, reaching 100% as the number of people reaches 366.

So, if you have a room full of 23 people, there is a 50% chance that two of them share the same birthday. We did this once in a college math class they had and it worked. One class didn't have any shares and for the other, I and someone else shared a birthday on Nov. 26.