Magic, Or Math? The Appeal Of Coincidences, And The Reality

[C C]

http://www.npr.org/2017/05/08/527442620/...he-reality

EXCERPT: [...] Understanding these odds can help us wrap our heads around stories of people who seem inexplicably fortunate. People like Joan Ginther, who won the lottery not once, not twice, but four times. [...] For better or worse, this sort of number-crunching can demystify even the most tantalizing coincidences. But that doesn't diminish their quirky serendipity. Take, for example, one of Joseph Mazur's favorite coincidence stories, about the 19th-century French poet Emile Deschamps....

[Magical Realist]

This sort of coincidence defies mathematical explanation. There's only one way to describe it — magical.

Yep..the plum pudding incidents are clear examples of synchronistic entanglement due to emotive effect . It's like that damn slow car in front of you that you wish would pull off the street. It turns at the same red light you turn at. Damn! It turns into the same parking lot you turn into. Damn it! And it parks at the store in the space right next to you. Hell no! It's the cruel ironic sense of humor of fate. Why does it only happen sometimes? Sometimes everything lines up and lets it happen. We may never know why.

[Secular Sanity]

http://www.npr.org/2017/05/08/527442620/...he-reality

EXCERPT: [...] Understanding these odds can help us wrap our heads around stories of people who seem inexplicably fortunate. People like Joan Ginther, who won the lottery not once, not twice, but four times. [...] For better or worse, this sort of number-crunching can demystify even the most tantalizing coincidences. But that doesn't diminish their quirky serendipity.

Wasn’t Mrs. Ginther a statistics professor? Maybe she figured out the algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery#Non-randomness

[C C]

Wasn’t Mrs. Ginther a statistics professor? Maybe she figured out the algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery#Non-randomness

Yep. Or (ironically for a professor) she and her accomplice did it by grunt approach of buying that outlandish number of tickets.

"Massive ticket buying, whatever the level, takes the steam out of most of the mysteries. Unless she was spending vast sums to mislead any potential investigations, she didn’t know exactly when winning tickets would show up. Nor did she need to, apparently."

The [33] footnote source seems to be the most ambitious scrutiny of Ginther. Actually a trio of articles from 2014.

Part One: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/lotter...-offs.html

Part Two: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation...lions.html

Part Three: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation...prize.html

[...] A series of discoveries based on painstaking analysis by Philly.com of newly obtained Texas Lottery records, with the help of experts, has led to a surprising conclusion: Basic gambling principles -- like card counting in blackjack, money management in poker, and timing in progressive slots -- may have inspired Joan Ginther to buy a flabbergasting number of $20 to $50 tickets, perhaps 80,000 worth $2.5 million or more. The numbers go up even higher -- up to $3.3 million -- with the discovery that Ginther may have been working with a friend.

As preposterous as those estimates sound, they’re not unthinkable. If one ticket takes 90 seconds to scratch, that’s 40 tickets an hour, making it feasible to knock off a thousand in a week, tens of thousands in a year. And that’s without enlisting friends or improvising shortcuts, like scratching just enough for a retailer’s scanner to read.

Bishop residents themselves estimated Ginther bought several thousand tickets a year, and even monopolized select games with a retailer’s help....