May 3, 2024 08:15 PM
(This post was last modified: May 3, 2024 08:21 PM by Magical Realist.)
When it rains it pours right? Seems like it sometimes. Amazingly there is a statistical basis for the truth of this old adage.
"What got me started on this decidedly random topic and peaked my fascination is why certain coincidences occur. Why does “everything happen at once” sometimes? An example that I am certain has happened to you: You’re asked by your spouse or other to run to the grocery store because “we’re out of fat-free Greek yogurt.” You reply: “Can it wait? It’s ten o’clock at night.” The return look answers the question. So, complying, as you do, you throw on your dirty sweatshirt and slippers, head down to the local Safeway and pad down the deserted aisles to the dairy section.
Who shops at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night? You round the corner and there, standing and staring at the shelf of Greek yogurts are the only other three customers in the store. Substitute yogurt for lima beans or the grocery store for the gas station. I began to wonder why this happens. What is the critical mass of coincidence, timing and happenstance that cause these convergences? The recent spate of lost-plane incidents in Indonesia seems to follow some collective arc.
The ‘answer’ or at least a description is found in something called Poisson Clumping, named for 19th century French mathematician Siméon Denis Poisson, he of distribution fame. PC is a statistical construct that addresses why, sometimes, ‘everything happens at once,’ alternatively why “chances of a big clump are more than you would think.”3 Poisson Clumping speaks to the notion that our universe is not homogenous, either in time or space, and that events tend to accumulate around a common timing. Clumping happens in nature and in man-made systems.
Like just today, I was walking along on a snowy street. People shoveling driveways, no cars anywhere and a single narrow plowed lane on a suburban street. I had been out about 30 minutes and encountered maybe two or three autos pushing through the mush and slush of the deserted streets. When, all of a sudden, a car is right behind me and another coming towards me. We intersected perfectly at the same time, same space. Poisson Clumping.
Poisson Clumping has been examined to look at patterns of testosterone excretion and aging in males4 it has been observed in data communications networks, when traffic tends to clump in certain times at certain parts of the network, unpredictably. We engineers like to have steady, forseeeable outcomes, however events don’t necessarily follow smooth deterministic patterns and confident predictions can go askew.
There is no such thing as absolutism, that is why a Poisson Clumping Heuristic is often invoked when looking at events that can’t be explained otherwise, heuristic meaning rule of thumb, educated guess or taking a stab: Perfect reasoning for EMC engineers."----
https://incompliancemag.com/on-sorghum-p...-meatloaf/
"What got me started on this decidedly random topic and peaked my fascination is why certain coincidences occur. Why does “everything happen at once” sometimes? An example that I am certain has happened to you: You’re asked by your spouse or other to run to the grocery store because “we’re out of fat-free Greek yogurt.” You reply: “Can it wait? It’s ten o’clock at night.” The return look answers the question. So, complying, as you do, you throw on your dirty sweatshirt and slippers, head down to the local Safeway and pad down the deserted aisles to the dairy section.
Who shops at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night? You round the corner and there, standing and staring at the shelf of Greek yogurts are the only other three customers in the store. Substitute yogurt for lima beans or the grocery store for the gas station. I began to wonder why this happens. What is the critical mass of coincidence, timing and happenstance that cause these convergences? The recent spate of lost-plane incidents in Indonesia seems to follow some collective arc.
The ‘answer’ or at least a description is found in something called Poisson Clumping, named for 19th century French mathematician Siméon Denis Poisson, he of distribution fame. PC is a statistical construct that addresses why, sometimes, ‘everything happens at once,’ alternatively why “chances of a big clump are more than you would think.”3 Poisson Clumping speaks to the notion that our universe is not homogenous, either in time or space, and that events tend to accumulate around a common timing. Clumping happens in nature and in man-made systems.
Like just today, I was walking along on a snowy street. People shoveling driveways, no cars anywhere and a single narrow plowed lane on a suburban street. I had been out about 30 minutes and encountered maybe two or three autos pushing through the mush and slush of the deserted streets. When, all of a sudden, a car is right behind me and another coming towards me. We intersected perfectly at the same time, same space. Poisson Clumping.
Poisson Clumping has been examined to look at patterns of testosterone excretion and aging in males4 it has been observed in data communications networks, when traffic tends to clump in certain times at certain parts of the network, unpredictably. We engineers like to have steady, forseeeable outcomes, however events don’t necessarily follow smooth deterministic patterns and confident predictions can go askew.
There is no such thing as absolutism, that is why a Poisson Clumping Heuristic is often invoked when looking at events that can’t be explained otherwise, heuristic meaning rule of thumb, educated guess or taking a stab: Perfect reasoning for EMC engineers."----
https://incompliancemag.com/on-sorghum-p...-meatloaf/
