30 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
PETWHAC
PETWHAC stands for Population of Events That Would Have
Appeared Coincidental. Population may seem an odd word, but it is the
correct statistical term. I won't keep using capital letters because they
stand so unattractively on the page. Somebody's watch stopping within
ten seconds of the psychic's incantation obviously belongs within the
petwhac, but so do many other events. Strictly speaking, the grandfather
clock's stopping should not be included. The mystic did not claim that he
could stop... 1 
notes
notes30 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
It is No Accident that We Inhabit a Veritable Paradise
Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be
colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed
the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze
soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon
a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and
it takes centuries to travel from each star to the nex... 1 notes
notes30 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Fortune of Conception
Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of
conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into
existence. If, like me, you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most
decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is the moment at which your
consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than
it was a split second before. To be sure, the embryonic you that came
into existen... 1 notes
notes24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Many Factors Combine to Allow Life on Earth
As we look at planet Earth and the factors that enabled us to be here, we quickly realize that our planet is very special. Here’s a short list: the long-term existence of a protective and oxygen-rich atmosphere; Earth’s axial tilt, stabilized by a single large moon; the ozone layer and the magnetic field, which jointly protect surface creatures from lethal cosmic radiation; plate tectonics, which regulates the levels of carbon dioxide and keeps the global temperature stable; the fact that...
1 Marcelo Gleiser's argument that the many favorable factors that produce life on Earth mean life could be very rare in the Universe.
17 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Banks Knows What Caused His Cancer
As we walk to the door, Banks pulls one final, left-field surprise. "Do you know that I know what caused the cancer?" I think I pull a face like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. "Cosmic ray," he says. "I won't brook any contradiction; it was a high-energy particle. A star exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago and ever since there's been a cosmic ray – a bad-magic bullet with my name on it, to quote Ken – heading towards the moment where it hit one of my cells and mutated it. That's an... 1 notes
notesClaims it was a "cosmic ray." A poetic notion.
12 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Natural Selection is Not Chance
Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection could quite unaided have drawn all the music of the biosphere. Indeed natural selection operates upon the products of chance and knows no other nourishment; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, from which chance is banned. Folksonomies: natural selection chance
Folksonomies: natural selection chance
1 notes
notesIt is an algorithm, a set of rules.
11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
We Must Become Comfortable with Large Numbers
Borel makes the amusing supposition of a million monkeys allowed to play upon the keys of a million typewriters. What is the chance that this wanton activity should reproduce exactly all of the volumes which are contained in the library of the British Museum? It certainly is not a large chance, but it may be roughly calculated, and proves in fact to be considerably larger than the chance that a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen will separate into the two pure constituents. After we have learned ...
1 In order to understand why a million monkey on a million typewriters might produce a great work of art.
30 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
The Chain of Chance to Homo Sapiens
If one small and odd lineage of fishes had not evolved fins capable of bearing weight on land (though evolved for different reasons in lakes and seas,) terrestrial vertebrates would never have arisen. If a large extraterrestrial object—the ultimate random bolt from the blue—had not triggered the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, mammals would still be small creatures, confined to the nooks and crannies of a dinosaur's world, and incapable of evolving the larger size that brain... 1 notes
notesGould lists the improbable events that had to happen in order for us to be here today.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
We Only Notice Certain Statistical Events
Sometimes we can literally count the number of ways you can reshuffle a series of bits - as with a pack of cards, for instance, where the 'bits' are the individual cards.
Suppose the dealer shuffles the pack and deals them out to four players, so that they each have 13 cards. I pick up my hand and gasp in astonishment. I have a complete hand of 13 spades! All the spades.
I am too startled to go on with the game, and I show my hand to the other three players, mowing they will be as amazed ... 1 notes
notesUsing the example of a remarkable card-dealing hand, Dawkins explains how every hand of cards is statistically improbable, but we only notice and awe at combinations that are significant to us in some way.
12 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
People are Too Disbelieving of Coincidence
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.Folksonomies: chance coincidence
Folksonomies: chance coincidence
1 notes
notes...and go to great lengths to construct rationalizations to explain it, when, in reality, a lack of coincidence would be an incredible coincidence.
