c4countdown

Posted: **Sat Oct 17, 2015 10:31 pm**

Can confirm.

Posted: **Sun Sep 18, 2016 10:21 pm**

Basically all other coincidences can now retire and go home, because the all-time great has happened. It's already been mentioned in another thread, but it deserves its moment in the sun. On Friday 16th September, I posted this

when I'm watching F1 motor racing, the commentators might say that someone has done a lap within 0.2 seconds of someone else. And by that, they don't mean just anywhere between 0 and 0.2 seconds - they mean 0.2 seconds slower. And it might even be rounded down to 0.2 (the exact gap might be e.g. 0.213 seconds), so it's not actually within 0.2 seconds at all!

Then on Saturday 17th September, qualifying for the Singapore GP happened, and Daniel Ricciardo outqualified Max Verstappen by 0.213 seconds. This is already fucking amazing, right? But that's not it. On the Autosport forum, Pyrone89 posted this:

Good lap by RIC, average by Verstappen (but still within 2 tenths in a car that didn't suit him).

Which was followed by this by RPM40:

Verstappen wasn't within 2 tenths. The gap was 0.213.

If there was a Nobel prize for coincidences, this one would win hands down.

Posted: **Sun Sep 18, 2016 10:46 pm**

Did you show THEM... THIS... ?

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2016 1:29 am**

Not just a bit of this then? Combine that with the coincidence and there you have it.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2016 6:16 am**

I was certainly impressed, although when you think about it the chance of a 0.213 gap between any 2 drivers isn't all that unlikely I suppose. Also, given that the average IQ on that forum is approximately 100 lower than this one (assuming Steven M McCann is no longer a member here), the chances of somebody claiming that 0.213 is within 0.2 are very high indeed.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2016 8:09 am**

Fred Mumford wrote:I was certainly impressed, although when you think about it the chance of a 0.213 gap between any 2 drivers isn't all that unlikely I suppose. Also, given that the average IQ on that forum is approximately 100 lower than this one (assuming Steven M McCann is no longer a member here), the chances of somebody claiming that 0.213 is within 0.2 are very high indeed.

He's back

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2016 8:48 pm**

JimBentley wrote:Not just a bit of this then? Combine that with the coincidence and there you have it.

Well, I don't think it's exactly confirmation bias - although maybe something along similar lines where you only notice certain things, and I was more likely to notice those forum posts having posted what I just did.

But if I searched for something similar in forum threads after qualifying for other races, I doubt I'd find anything.

But then obviously so many things happen to us over the course of each day that eventually stuff will come up that seems quite eerie. It would be freaky if it didn't! But then you could probably write off every coincidence ever that way. And one coincidence still has to win the Nobel prize for coincidences, and this is still the favourite.

Also, coincidences are always bigger to the person experiencing them than to anyone they tell. That's because the person they tell knows lots of people, so the chances of it happening to one of them is much greater than it happening to themselves. That's not a case of the person experiencing the coincidence being biased - it's just the way coincidences work. But anyway, since the original post was made on this forum before part 2 happened, it's actually a coincidence for everyone on here - not just me. So you should all be freaked out. This was the biggest coincidence ever.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2016 9:19 pm**

Gavin Chipper wrote:This was the biggest coincidence ever.

I wonder what the biggest coincidence ever could be (not that I intend to disparage the rest of your post of course)? What if a woman (who had already had one or more kids) had a sex change and then went on unwittingly to impregnate one of his kids as a man, but then deliberately had another kid with his own child (in an incest-type scenario)? That's got to be pretty long odds, but I'm sure you lot can beat it, you degenerate scum.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2016 10:20 pm**

JimBentley wrote:
Gavin Chipper wrote:This was the biggest coincidence ever.
I wonder what the biggest coincidence ever could be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d4wPaBNryA

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2016 10:59 pm**

JimBentley wrote:
Gavin Chipper wrote:This was the biggest coincidence ever.
I wonder what the biggest coincidence ever could be (not that I intend to disparage the rest of your post of course)? What if a woman (who had already had one or more kids) had a sex change and then went on unwittingly to impregnate one of his kids as a man, but then deliberately had another kid with his own child (in an incest-type scenario)? That's got to be pretty long odds, but I'm sure you lot can beat it, you degenerate scum.

I'm not sure I follow, particularly the bit in bold. How do you accidentally impregnate one of your kids without it being an incest-type scenario?

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2016 11:02 pm**

JimBentley wrote:
Gavin Chipper wrote:This was the biggest coincidence ever.
I wonder what the biggest coincidence ever could be

Sometimes I wonder if you could get a number (like pi or something but not necessarily pi) that should be irrational, but somehow ends up as rational by some sort of infinite coincidence. So instead of all the decimal places being like 458572101832907540932, after a certain point it just recurs, or basically ends and goes 00000000000000 forever. The numbers are still all effectively "random", but they're all 0.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2016 11:26 pm**

JimBentley wrote:...What if a woman (who had already had one or more kids) had a sex change and then went on unwittingly to impregnate one of his kids as a man, but then had another kid with his own child (in an incest-type scenario)?

Gavin Chipper wrote:I'm not sure I follow, particularly the bit in bold. How do you accidentally impregnate one of your kids without it being an incest-type scenario?

I imagine that all the parties involved had received some sort of plastic surgery (beyond the sex changes and all that) and would have lost touch with one another, possibly as a result of their insane plastic surgery fetishes. So as they wouldn't recognise one another when they met. I think might make it work.

Posted: **Tue Sep 20, 2016 12:12 pm**

Gavin Chipper wrote:
JimBentley wrote:
Gavin Chipper wrote:This was the biggest coincidence ever.
I wonder what the biggest coincidence ever could be
Sometimes I wonder if you could get a number (like pi or something but not necessarily pi) that should be irrational, but somehow ends up as rational by some sort of infinite coincidence. So instead of all the decimal places being like 458572101832907540932, after a certain point it just recurs, or basically ends and goes 00000000000000 forever. The numbers are still all effectively "random", but they're all 0.

I suspect a number like that would fail to fit the definition of irrational.

Posted: **Tue Sep 20, 2016 2:25 pm**

This page about mathematical coincidences is quite interesting.

Posted: **Tue Sep 20, 2016 3:05 pm**

Gavin Chipper wrote:This page about mathematical coincidences is quite interesting.

That was interesting, cheers for that, man.

I remember in A-Level Physics and we had finished whatever bit we were doing that day, the teacher would talk about stuff like this. The bit I remember best is talking about the hypothetical possibility of there being some sort of relationship between the universal constants, like pi, e, root 2, c (as in the speed of light), etc. (as far as I recall, there wasn't, or if there was we'd definitely know about it by now). I know there's a relationship between some of them when you introduce imaginary numbers (that is, that i² = -1) but that's not really the same thing, is it? Fascinating subject, anyway.

Posted: **Wed Sep 21, 2016 2:35 pm**

Mark James wrote:
JimBentley wrote:
Gavin Chipper wrote:This was the biggest coincidence ever.
I wonder what the biggest coincidence ever could be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d4wPaBNryA

I've only seen a few episodes of Seinfeld so I hadn't seen that previously. But then yesterday (less than 24 hours after you posted that), I went round my friend's flat and we watched a few episodes. And that episode came up!

And this was in no way contrived. Watching episodes of Seinfeld is what we generally do when I go round his flat and we've been watching them in order, so it wasn't hand-picked. We also hadn't had a Seinfeld session in quite a while before last night, so it was a bit strange that this came up the day after you posted this. It must be coincidence season. And also a coincidence about coincidences is pretty meta!

Posted: **Wed Sep 21, 2016 2:44 pm**

Gavin Chipper wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d4wPaBNryA

Aw, now you've made me want to watch them all again, but I've only got them on video and haven't got a working video player anymore.

Posted: **Wed Sep 21, 2016 4:52 pm**

I have all the episodes on dvd and I have a dvd/vcr combo thing but the dvd tray mechanism is broken and won't open but the vcr is fine. So both of us have the means to watch each others copies but neither of us can watch our own. Coincidence?

Posted: **Wed Sep 21, 2016 5:30 pm**

Mark James wrote:I have all the episodes on dvd and I have a dvd/vcr combo thing but the dvd tray mechanism is broken and won't open but the vcr is fine. So both of us have the means to watch each others copies but neither of us can watch our own. Coincidence?

I think the obvious thing to do is for you to send me your DVD/VCR combo thing and I'll send you a working DVD player. Everyone wins! Especially the parcel carriers.

Posted: **Wed Sep 21, 2016 10:47 pm**

Ian Volante wrote:
Gavin Chipper wrote: Sometimes I wonder if you could get a number (like pi or something but not necessarily pi) that should be irrational, but somehow ends up as rational by some sort of infinite coincidence. So instead of all the decimal places being like 458572101832907540932, after a certain point it just recurs, or basically ends and goes 00000000000000 forever. The numbers are still all effectively "random", but they're all 0.
I suspect a number like that would fail to fit the definition of irrational.

Yep. Referring to the digits of a number as "random" is just a figure of speech, so shouldn't be confused with the other sense of random (i.e. unpredictable). If you could prove that the number in question was subject to this "infinite coincidence" then you would've proved that it's rational. So the statement "should be irrational" doesn't make much sense.

By the way, here's a fun method for calculating a specific digit of pi without having to calculate all the ones before it. (So if you've ever wondered what the 81,241,873,352nd digit of pi is, you can now find out.)

In more fun news, have I linked to this episode of the This American Life podcast before? It's full of great coincidences. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-a ... e-no-story

Posted: **Thu Sep 22, 2016 8:43 pm**

I've a feeling this one's apocryphal and even if it isn't, my memory of it is almost certainly a bit confused. But I'm posting it anyway because it's quite funny (in a dark way), if nothing else.

Apparently in the Wild West (of the USA obviously) gunfights (as in duels) were still quite the thing right up until about the 1890s or so (I'm unsure what happened then but they seemed to go out of fashion).

Anyway, towards the end of this period, these two guys were involved in one but neither was very good at doing it. One guy (I'll call him Guy 1 because I don't know his name) fired his bullet and missed spectacularly, firing his bullet into a tree (one of many in a nearby forest) and the other guy (Guy 2) just plain missed (eventual bullet location unknown). As was the custom of the time, this was deemed a draw and it ended there, so far as that gunfight was concerned.

At the time of the gunfight, these were two young gunslingers; in that era you could make a good living as a gunslinger by robbing banks, bars, trains and stuff, so a lot of youngsters took to it as a viable career. These two were only their early twenties at best and possibly younger.

But as the 20th Century approached, most of these dudes realised that they couldn't really sustain a good living by armed robbery and all that, so naturally moved into more respectable interests. Anwhow, so the story goes, Guy 2 had at some point secured a job as a demolition expert, as he knew all about blowing things up, usually with dynamite. Sometime in the 1930s, he got a contract to clear a particular area of land in order to make it a habitable area. The area of land to be cleared was mainly occupied by an old forest. More specifically, it was the forest besides which Guy 1 and Guy 2 did their (frankly poor quality) gunfight.

Guy 2 went about his business as usual, rigging up his dynamite charges strategically to effectively destroy the forest. It worked - after all, he was one of the best dynamiters in the business - but in doing so, the bullet that Guy 1 had fired in the gunfight (the one that missed and lodged itself in a tree) was somehow propelled by the explosion straight out of the tree into Guy 2's chest, killing him instantly.

So, Guy 1 won the gunfight, but it took forty-odd years. If true, this would be an amazing coincidence.

I have my doubts but it's an entertaining story, isn't it?

Posted: **Thu Sep 22, 2016 9:02 pm**

I like all the coincidences mentioned in the film Magnolia the film is worth a watch too

Posted: **Sun Sep 25, 2016 11:59 am**

Gavin Chipper wrote:
JimBentley wrote:
Gavin Chipper wrote:This was the biggest coincidence ever.
I wonder what the biggest coincidence ever could be
Sometimes I wonder if you could get a number (like pi or something but not necessarily pi) that should be irrational, but somehow ends up as rational by some sort of infinite coincidence. So instead of all the decimal places being like 458572101832907540932, after a certain point it just recurs, or basically ends and goes 00000000000000 forever. The numbers are still all effectively "random", but they're all 0.

The answer is something along the lines of 'it is possible, but with probability zero'. There are normal numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number) which more or less exhibit complete randomness to all number bases. If you were to generate a real number between 0 and 1 with an infinite sequence of 10-sided die rolls, then the likelihood of you generating a rational, algebraic (the solution of a polynomial with integer coefficients) or non-normal (i.e. non random) number is zero. This because, as subsets of [0,1], these sets have Lebesgue measure zero. Then it becomes a question more philosophical rather than mathematical as to whether 'with probability zero' is the same as 'impossible'.

Posted: **Sun Sep 25, 2016 1:01 pm**

Was just battling with the Omelette selection 'OYAD', and the bloke talking on the radio emphasised the word 'TODAY'. Thanks, I thought.

Posted: **Sun Sep 25, 2016 1:29 pm**

Ian Volante wrote:Was just battling with the Omelette selection 'OYAD', and the bloke talking on the radio emphasised the word 'TODAY'. Thanks, I thought.

And then a few minutes later, reading a post of Facebook about someone's holiday in Split, someone said 'split' on the radio. Very exciting.

Posted: **Sun Sep 25, 2016 1:56 pm**

Ian Volante wrote:Was just battling with the Omelette selection 'OYAD', and the bloke talking on the radio emphasised the word 'TODAY'. Thanks, I thought.

I'm telling.

Posted: **Tue Sep 27, 2016 12:36 pm**

Ian Volante wrote:Was just battling with the Omelette selection 'OYAD', and the bloke talking on the radio emphasised the word 'TODAY'. Thanks, I thought.

Lucky coincidence that was.

Posted: **Wed Sep 28, 2016 12:59 am**

Gavin Chipper wrote:
Ian Volante wrote:Was just battling with the Omelette selection 'OYAD', and the bloke talking on the radio emphasised the word 'TODAY'. Thanks, I thought.
I'm telling.

Hey, if the chorus to Harry Belafonte's famous Banana Boat Song had been playing at the time, the radio easily might have led you to try a certain invalid 4, so I think it all balances out.

Posted: **Wed Sep 28, 2016 10:34 am**

Johnny Canuck wrote:
Gavin Chipper wrote:
Ian Volante wrote:Was just battling with the Omelette selection 'OYAD', and the bloke talking on the radio emphasised the word 'TODAY'. Thanks, I thought.
I'm telling.
Hey, if the chorus to Harry Belafonte's famous Banana Boat Song had been playing at the time, the radio easily might have led you to try a certain invalid 4, so I think it all balances out.

Posted: **Wed Sep 28, 2016 10:53 am**

Johnny Canuck wrote:
Gavin Chipper wrote:
Ian Volante wrote:Was just battling with the Omelette selection 'OYAD', and the bloke talking on the radio emphasised the word 'TODAY'. Thanks, I thought.
I'm telling.
Hey, if the chorus to Harry Belafonte's famous Banana Boat Song had been playing at the time, the radio easily might have led you to try a certain invalid 4, so I think it all balances out.

You know, I was thinking the same thing. And I would have gone for it!

Posted: **Wed Sep 28, 2016 1:00 pm**

I listen to a radio show where the DJ just continually reads out the most common words on Apterous.

Edit - Also after seeing a word that was printed on a nearby book that was also in the selection, which I don't think is deemed illegal, I decided to take this to its logical conclusions and get some wallpaper made that's just a printout of common Apterous words.

(None of this is true.)

Posted: **Thu Nov 17, 2016 10:50 pm**

Other than the fictional Garth Marenghi, there are two people in the world called Garth - Brooks and Crooks. I think that counts.

Posted: **Thu Nov 17, 2016 11:34 pm**

Gavin Chipper wrote:Other than the fictional Garth Marenghi, there are two people in the world called Garth - Brooks and Crooks. I think that counts.

Garth Brooks real name is Troyal though. In the fictional world there's also Garth from Wayne's World who I would have thought is more well known than Marenghi.

Posted: **Fri Mar 16, 2018 10:58 pm**

Charlie Reams wrote: ↑Wed Sep 21, 2016 10:47 pmBy the way, here's a fun method for calculating a specific digit of pi without having to calculate all the ones before it. (So if you've ever wondered what the 81,241,873,352nd digit of pi is, you can now find out.)

I still find this very odd. And it's not just the digits before but potentially many of the digits after that you'd think you'd have to know in some cases. You might have, say, a 5 followed by a million zeroes so it would take quite a lot of precision to know it's not a 4 followed by 9s. Weird stuff.

Posted: **Fri Apr 20, 2018 5:59 pm**

I was just listening to this on YouTube, and saw RIP comments below that were just a couple of minutes old. And this came up on BBC news. And no, I wasn't subtly influenced by his death in some way. I'd been meaning to look this song up for a while, and then did.

Posted: **Sat Apr 28, 2018 3:38 pm**

I was talking to my work colleagues about immersive cinema experiences and this came on my timeline http://dlsh.it/eJxSOTi
Someone must have read my mind cos I've always thought this idea would be good

Posted: **Wed Jan 02, 2019 10:20 am**

William Tunstall-Pedoe did my local parkrun yesterday, and then followed it up by doing a second parkrun at my second nearest (you can do two parkruns on New Year's Day). Who? William Tunstall-Pedoe is who!

Posted: **Wed Jan 02, 2019 1:30 pm**

Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Wed Jan 02, 2019 10:20 am William Tunstall-Pedoe did my local parkrun yesterday, and then followed it up by doing a second parkrun at my second nearest (you can do two parkruns on New Year's Day). Who? William Tunstall-Pedoe is who!

Unfortunate surname......

Posted: **Sun Jun 16, 2019 10:53 pm**

(Cross-post from Facebook, I feel this is good enough to warrant it.)

While we're sitting around, my girlfriend likes to pepper me with clues from whatever cryptic crossword she's doing. Today she was saying "Do you know a nine-letter word..." and I thought it would be amusing to interrupt at that point and say "yes -- termagent". She said "does that mean 'bad-tempered woman'?" and I, confusedly, said yes. Turns out this was the correct answer! It took us a few minutes to convince each other that this wasn't any sort of trick and was really just the weirdest coincidence. (I initially thought she was joking about the clue and she thought I must've somehow read the clues beforehand.)

To answer some obvious coincidence-busting: she was doing a random cryptic from 2003 on Guardian Online, so there's no way I could've seen it earlier in the day, and she was doing it on the computer facing away from me so I couldn't have seen the clue. She also didn't know the word so there's no way she could've somehow hinted it to me. And in any case, I said that particular word because I had been thinking the previous day (while commuting by myself) that TERMAGENT and PTARMIGAN are similar-sounding nine-letter words which share almost no spelling in common (which happened before she'd even picked which crossword to start) so it just came to my mind immediately as a nine.

Assuming that I know every nine-letter word on Apterous (which of course I definitely do) that's about a 32,000-1 odds. Not bad eh?

Posted: **Mon Jun 17, 2019 7:37 am**

I like it. Especially the extra detail you've treated C4c to. Mostly I enjoy the thought of you pondering termagent and ptarmigan on your commute.

Posted: **Thu Apr 06, 2023 8:40 am**

In my job I have to claim money for materials used and I was totalling up four fairly random cost amounts and the exact total of the four amounts was 1234.56.

Posted: **Thu Apr 06, 2023 11:51 am**

Mark James wrote: ↑Thu Apr 06, 2023 8:40 am In my job I have to claim money for materials used and I was totalling up four fairly random cost amounts and the exact total of the four amounts was 1234.56.

Not up to termagent standards, but a nice little diversion.

Posted: **Thu Apr 06, 2023 12:20 pm**

While making the comment about NORTHEST/SOUTHERN in Tuesday’s spoilers thread, I had to go back to the subtitles file to recall what Steve Cram’s comment had been. So I did a Ctrl+F for the word SOUTHERN. Turns out I actually had Wednesday’s subtitles open - but of course, I still got a result

(And then I wondered where to post that amusing coincidence and coincidentally found this thread today)

Posted: **Thu Apr 06, 2023 12:31 pm**

Subtitles file?

Posted: **Thu Apr 06, 2023 3:20 pm**

Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Thu Apr 06, 2023 12:31 pm Subtitles file?

Yep. Just an XML available on Channel 4’s site if you dig a bit. It gives the text that the episode subtitles say. You can get most game details there

c4countdown

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