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Conspiracies And Probability
guttentag writes "Sunday's New York Times Magazine is running a feature that looks at the rumored conspiracy that allegedly killed nearly a dozen bioterror and germ warfare researchers during a four month period following the U.S. anthrax scare. "What are the odds," people ask, despite the fact that a "one-in-a-million miracle" will statistically occur 280 times a day in the U.S. These strange things happen all the time, but we hype them because they provide the spice in literature and the comfort of comprehension."
This happened a long time ago and I think Salon covered it. Maybe I read it on another website.
linux is sucks, lol
We have Bush as our President. Let's figure out that conspiracy first.
5 out of 4 of people have a hard time with fractions
Hemos posted the same story back in May: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/0 5/0043203&mode=thread&tid=134
but do I really have to register myself with the NY Times?
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
Which means there are about 6000 people exactly like you.
sig.
You could find the odds exactly if you knew several figures:
What is the number of bio-whatnot researchers in the group?
What are the odds of one dying in a given time period?
And this is the hardest: How many comparable groups are there in society? For example, politicians dying would be noticed. Baseball players dying would be noticed. And how big are these groups?
If you answer these simple questions, you can answer the main topic.
Wow, this is almost three years past being topical. Good work, shit head.
If a woman gets pregnant after sitting on a soiled toilet seat, is a "miracle" really the proper term?
I noticed a car with the license plate JAA 768 next to another car with the license plate XPA 117.
It was amazing.
I mean, do you have any idea how staggeringly improbable it was for me to see those two license plates next to each other?
Once in a million things happen atleast 1000 times, and once in a billion things happen atleast once!
And all time time I was afraid that the FBI was monitoring my Inter-.........
million-to-one chances happen 9 times out of ten
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
... is what this reminds me of. Math says that anything that can happen will happen given enough time --- much the same as some number n monkeys typing at n typewriters will eventually produce the Library of Congress. Of course, we're talking about very large values of n and incredibly long amounts of time...
Why is it so much more comfortable for us to see massive orchestrated conspiracy where there is really nothing but 1) random chance or 2) stupidity.
As in, a lone crazy man slips through some very sloppy secret service security and puts a bullet in the president, 30 years later we're still speculating about secret mafia/cuban/communist/military-instrustrial complex theories. We actually bend the facts to make it fit. Visit the Book Depository in Dallas; if you look out that window down into the street, Oswald's shot looks rather easy to make. It's right there.
Why can't we just accept that? If there's a crime to be investigated, investigate it. Fine. But twenty years from now some conspiracy nut will still be speculating about who or what killed those scientists. Probably the same guy who did Vince Foster and Ron Brown...
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
It is quite plausible to argue that the chance of at least one conspiracy theories being true is also quite high. I mean... It just boils down to which ones, right?
Some of this crap *has* came true, btw. the US government has denied any base in "area 51" for about as long as it existed. until more photos showed up. and russia shot down an U-2, and F117 was unveild to be designed there, etc. the only difference is that by this day and age, "area 51" is no longer considered a conspiracy.
so... the truth is still out there. just have to believe in the right one (or two) and filter out the other million or so...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
What are the odds that nearly a dozen biochemists would die in one way or another over a period of five months, and that an article would appear in the New York Times proclaiming that it wasn't a conspiracy?
He's quoted in the article, and it's worth reading his stuff. His home page is here, and there's an archive of his ABC Who's Counting columns here..
Go read 'em.
Stanislaw Lem's "The Chain of Chance" deals with just about this very sort of thing, actually. Emergent properties of large populations, more, though.
a "one-in-a-million miracle" will statistically occur 280 times a day in the U.S.
This means that there is just a single one-in-a-million miracle that humans can observe, but it is likely that there are many and each of them will occur roughly 280 times a day in a population of 280 million. (this assumes that a one-in-a-million miracle is something which the odds of happening to a specific person on a specific day is 1/1,000,000 and which can be observed by other humans (having an abnormally high number of neutrinos pass through your body in a specific nanosecond would be something that is unlikely but wouldn't be miracle worthy))
...that the media is part of the conspiracies?
Seriously, once we are all aware that these random conjunctions of events happen frequently we will be more likely to ignore/dismiss/deny the seemingly coincidental events that the conspiracies trigger?
Proof that happenstance can cause suspicious events is not proof that all suspicious events are caused by happenstance.
its crazy sounding and artbellish does not make it a non fact. i had read about FEMA sights that had been desingned to be concentration camps for undesirables during times of martial law crackdown, complete with railroad tracks so that people could be railed directly in, and i packed up and traveled cross country and found four of these myself. they were even gaurded by uniformed govt agents that were militaristic, but no of common military. i have seen area 51 myself. i have lived in a town that had a fellow living there that had been experimented on by the govt. there are without a doubt things going on that are highly conspiritorical in nature, and to automaticaly chuckle at the possibilities of this is the reason these things are able to happen in the first place. the conpiritors know that most by far will think it is ludicris and also simply not care, as long as it doesnt affect them personaly. i wasnt going to bring this up, but shit on it. i know someone personaly who was once a govt assasin and was stationed in a very remote cold ass location for easy dispatchment all around the world. if you could have a good conversation with him youd wet your pants and cry for mommy.
Google for "operation northwoods" and you will discover that the military, in the 1960s, as a matter of public record, were laying plans to attack American citizens in order to stir up support for a war on Cuba.
That's not speculation, that is public record, learned through researching and the Freedom Of Information Act. They didn't actually carry out any of these plans, or blow up John Glenn's orbital space flight, because saner heads, including McNamara, refused to even consider allowing the military to make attacks on the country's own citizens for PR reasons.
The plans were still being seriously put forth.
How are you going to explain to people that this was reality, public record, proven, and that the anthrax/researcher killings you're talking about are not proven to that level of confidence? You will only make people less willing to believe the proven and important facts about the military making plans to target US civilians.
And I think that is too high a price to pay. This is the time where people need to learn to listen, not be confused by wild stories.
Choose your stories carefully, and talk about them carefully. It's like traditional investigative journalism- you don't charge madly ahead or you get discredited and lose everything you worked for.
From the article... For instance, although the numbers 9/11 (9 plus 1 plus 1) equal 11, and American Airlines Flight 11 was the first to hit the twin towers, and there were 92 people on board (9 plus 2), and Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year (2 plus 5 plus 4), and there are 11 letters each in ''Afghanistan,'' ''New York City'' and ''the Pentagon'' (and while we're counting, in George W. Bush) ... Good God! George W Bush is an Al Qaida terrorist!
I am always amazed by the gullibility of the general populice. How can people honestly believe that a modern government could harbour ANY kind of conspiracy given that they can't even keep the affair of a President with an intern secret?? If there really were aliens on earth, UFOs circling the solar system, etc., you'd be guaranteed that somebody, somewhere who wasn't hushed up by "the government" would have reported it on the 'net. Conspiracy theories are just another method for selling media to the masses.
Anybody remember the urban legend running around that Microsoft had previous knowledge of September 11th? If not, check out this site:
http://198.64.129.160/rumors/wingding.htm
The short explanation is that if you take the letters NYC and put them into the 'Webdings' font, you'll get an icon of an eye, a heart, and a building. It looks a little like "I love New York". Then, if you change the font to Windings, you get a Skull/Crossbones, a Jewish star, and a Thumb's up.
This sparked a heated controversy accusing Microsoft programmers of hiding anti-Jewish messages in software. They used lines like 'The odds of that occuring are trillions to one, it had to have been intentional.'
Well I'll tell you guys what I think: To imply that anybody left a message like that in a font is absurd. What really happened was that somebody was presented with some icons, and they extracted a meaningful message from them. That's it! The 'Death to Jews' icons that show up in Wingdings are only interesting because "NYC" calls them up. The link between 'NYC' and 'death of Jews' didn't become meaningful until 9-11. Before 9-11, it took a lot of creativity to try to paint MS in a bad light with that 'message'.
Now, one could could measure the probability of NYC creating a message that implies death to Jews and realistically say it's astronomically improbable. However, one cannot use that to establish guilt. The simple fact of the matter is that anybody can pull symbollic meaning out of any combination of letters. Common sense and evidence must factor in to questions like these. Did somebody at MS intentionally hide anti Jewish messages in a font? To convince me of that, I'd have to talk to the programmer.
I remember somebody used the 'odds of safely going to the moon and back' to prove that the moon landing was a hoax. If memory serves, it was well over 1 in 1000. Frankly, common sense says that the odds weren't anywhere near as bleak as he had measured. Nasa had a pretty good idea what was involved and built a vehicle to withstand those conditions. The only real/i odds they had to face were uncertainty. "What are the odds of something happening to cause greater forces than we had anticipated?"
Nasa maniuplated the odds in their favor, and they succeeded. End of story.
In any case, I find probability to be a relatively useless topic when attempting to establish possibilities of achievement or in judging guilt. It's one thing to measure them in Las Vegas, it's another to measure them when trying to predict anything nature has control over.
"Derp de derp."
"What are the odds," people ask, despite the fact that a "one-in-a-million miracle" will statistically occur 280 times a day in the U.S.
Probability that this "280" number is just a big fat guess: 0.999999999999
(And it depends on how one defines "miracle".)
Table-ized A.I.
As for this particular issue of the dead scientists, there's been no good evidence either way, and so it hasn't appeared at all in my blog.
...that within 24 hours, there'll be a dramatic story about Microsoft doing something wrong followed by a boring story about somebody switching to Linux in a vain attempt to make it appear more mass-market ready than it really is?
It's not very often that 1:1 odds prove there's a conspiracy.
Three years ago I coulda told you about pedophile priests and get this now.....a church conspiracy to cover it up. Thank god I was full of shit.....oh wait.....
Don't feel bad though, I too was once a snot-nosed kid who thought he knew everything there was to know. Here's one for all you "sceptics" out there. I know y'all are real good at saying what something isn't. Check out the cattle mutilations in Argentina. Can any of your explain what it IS? Didn't think so...---Most Definitely not a Karma Whore---
Uh huh... everyone agrees with you = solid support for sensible policies. Everyone disagrees with you = GROUPTHINK!
Specifically, in a probability textbook I saw a long time ago, the preface opened with a rivetingly complex proof, well beyond my ability to follow in detail both then and now. But I got the jist. The quick version is that, "mathematically speaking," something nearly impossible happens nearly every instant. A logical pun, so to speak.
And yet, am I really paranoid for suspecting that the Enron executive who committed suicide recently was murdered? Is that a hollywood-addled sense of the world, or is it simply realistic; it's not a difficult to accept fact that people have been killed over far, far smaller amounts of money. And the money is only the tip of the iceberg of conspiracies that was Enron.
Call it a coincidence that all of these scientists died in such rapid succession if you want. But I will do you one better. I won't say it's proof of a conspiracy, and I won't say it's a coincidence either.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
It seems that the author of the article--what do women know about math anyway--didn't bother to research primary sources of her stories.
"Odds are, unlikely things will happen."
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
You want knowledge of REAL coverups? You want conspiracies of highes tlevel possible? TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponder!
g C: www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html
l
: www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html
M C: www.aiag.org/publications/b11.html
A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFid chips embedded in the tire).
Yup. My brother works on them.
Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.
Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car.
I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].
It is for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.
Photos of chips before molded into tires:
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:TAQIKjBI01
(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it insertess usually into the url above to get to the shocking info and photos on the enbedded LOGI 160 chips that the us gov scans when you cross mexican and canadian borders.)
You never heard of it either because nobody moderates on slashdot anymore and this is probably +0 still. It has also never appeared in print before and is very secret.
Californias Fastpass is being upgraded to scan ALL responding car tires in future years upcoming. I-75 may get them next in rural funnel points in Ohio.
http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.htm
but the fact is... YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE A RADIO TRANSPONDER not counting your digital cell phone which is routinely silently pulsed in CA bay area each rush hour morning unless turned off (consult Wired Magazine Expose article). Those data point pulses are used by NSA on occasions.
The us FBI with NRO/NSA blessings, has requested us gov make this tire scanning information as secret as the information regarding all us inkjet printers sold in usa in the last 3 years using "yellow" GUID barcode under dark ink regions to serialize printouts to thwart counterfeiting of 20 dollar bills. (30 to 40 percent of ALL California counterfeiting is done using cheap Epson inkjet printers, most purchased with credit cards foolishly). Luckily court dockets divulge the existence of the Epson serial numbers on your printouts... but nobody except a handful of people know about this Tire scanning upgrade to big brother's arsenal.
YOU MUST BUY NEUTRALIZED OR FOREIGN TIRES!!!!! Soon such tires will become illegal to import or manufacture, just as Gasoline must have "Taggants" added or gasoline is illegal, as are non-self-aging 9 mm bullets.
It is currently VERY illegal to buy or disable the "911 help" GPS emitter in digital cell phones in the US or ship a modified phone across state borders, but it is still legal to turn off your cell phone in your car while travelling. As you should. And you should be wary of your tires now too. : http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:TAQIKjBI01gC
Alternatively you could illegally build jamming devices at : 13.56 MHz, + 1,356 MHz +- many freqs (TI-RFid) and a few others. If microwave is ever employed you might not be able to effectively jam but your brain would possibly cook over time, as it now known as of this year that the three harmonic resonances of water are not the only chemical actions harming human tissue at gigaherz frequencies. Jammers would be illegal and violators easy to locate. Tire removal is the only option.
RFIDs have been covertly used and sold by TI for over ten years are in many many products... and now your tires are being read by the us gov as you drive at speeds of up to 100 Mph on primary US interstate corridors. (Actually 160 km/h).
Those same US interstate corridors have radiation detectors too, but a small layer of stacks of interlocked graphite blocks those from detecting stealthy deliveries. Graphite blocks are IDEAL for shipping "dirty bomb" components, I believe.
Anyway, regarding tire radio transmitters: the sokymat LOGI 160, and sokymat LOGI 120) are just SOME of the transponders found in modern tires. The earliest tire radio spy chips had only 64 bit serial numbers but they have rapidly evolved post Sept 11 bombings: LOGI 160 LOGI 120 has 224 bit R/W memory (sokymat.ch) to be marked using external hand help injectors with "salt" info when the fbi tags your parked car.
Basically the FBI "marks your car" without touching it physically, thus eliminating a "warrant" to put a locater on your vehicle. Just as the FBI can listen to you while you are at home by LEGALLY bouncing an infrared beam off your vibrating window pane and modulating the signal, the US Gov can LEGALLY inject (program) a saltable read-write sokymat LOGI eeprom tire chip (and other brands of tire transponders)
Using these chips to track people while they drive is actually the idea of the us gov, and current chips CANNOT BE DISABLED or removed. They hope ALL tires will have these chips in 5 years and hope people have a very hard time finding non-chipped tires. Removing the chips is near impossible without destroying the tire as the chips were designed with that DARPA design goal.
They are hardened against removal or heat damage or easy eye detection and can be almost ANYWHERE in the new "big brother" tires. In fact in current models they are integrated early and deep into the substrate of the tire as per US FBI request.
Our freedom of travel are going away in 2003, because now there is an international STANDARD for all tire transponder RFID chips and in 2004 nearly ALL USA cars will have them. Refer to AIAG B-11 ADC, (B-11 is coincidentally Post Sept 11 fastrack initiative by US Gov to speed up tire chip standardization to one read-back standard for highway usage).
The AIAG is "The Automotive Industry Action Group"
The non proprietary (non-sokymat controlled) standard is the AIAG B-11 standard is the "Tire Label and Radio Frequency Identification" standard
"ADC" stands for "Automatic Data Collection"
The "AIDCW" is the US gov manipulated "Automatic Identification Data Collection Work Group"
The standard was started and finished rapidly in less than a year as a direct consequence of the Sep 11 attacks by Saudi nationals.
I believe detection of the AIAG B-11 radio chips (RFIS serial number transponders) in the upgraded car tracking http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.html is currently secret knowledge. Another reason to leave "finger print on Driver license" California, but Ohio gets it next, as will every other state eventually.
The AIAG is claiming the chips reduce car theft, assist in tracking defects, and assists error-proofing the tire assembly process. But the real secret is that these 5 cent devices are a us government backed initiative to track citizens travel without their consent or ability to disable the transponders in any way.
All tire manufacturers are forced to comply AIAG B-11 3.0 Radio Tire tracking standard by the 2004 model year.
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:-qJPsZjkMA
Viewing b11 synopsis is free, downloads from that are $10 and tracked by the FBI. Use the google cache to avoid leaving breadcrumbs.
And just as showerheads are now illegal to import into the USA from Canada or mexico, as are drums of industrial Freon, and standard size toilets are illegal to import for home use, soon car tires without radio transponders will be illegal to bring across state borders.
The US gov is getting away with this. You read it here first.
Learn and read.
There was quite a little condescention in the mathematician's reply to the author, and there were problems with assumptions he suggested as well. You could almost suspect he was trying to redirect the reporter's attention, no, wait . . .
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
While yes its true that a one in a million event can occur 280 times per day..
a chain of one in a million events occuring in a very small time frame is more than coincidence..
its simple permutations and combinations math to show why this is so..
Someone forgot to error check again!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Me and my girlfriend (at the time) won a trip on WestJet airways to fly anywhere in Western Canada so we decided to go to Edmonton. We thought we'd do some shopping.
Anyways, we are walking around West Edmonton Mall and as far as I know, I do not know a SINGLE PERSON living in Edmonton. Anyways, we stop somewhere in the mall and decide we need to get at least one picture of us in Edmonton taken by somebody else. So I find the nearest guy walking in the mall and ask him to take my picture.
As I'm asking him, I have absolutely no clue (even though if I was paying the least bit of attention I would have) that this is my partner from the one business I had started at school to sell my study notes. I didn't know he lived in Edmonton (obviously since I didn't know anyone who lived there) but I eerily asked the only person I probably knew living in Edmonton to take my picture without even having known it was him before I asked him.
Anyways, I thought this was an opportune moment to notice that, yes, indeed, coincidences do happen.
Sunny
Be my Friend
And read Heinlein's "Year of the Jackpot" (1952)- fun story about a year when all kinds of vastly improbable things happen to come all at once: bizarre fads (compulsive nudism and lawn-watering), natural disasters, invading communists, the reemergence of Atlantis...
Though the concept of "YotJ" is more that these things come in cycles, and this is the year all the cycles line up.
Collected in "The Menace From Earth".
This one in a million thread got me thinking... As we work with higher and higher data rates, with bit error rates remaining relatively constant, things that use to happen infrequently happen alot. On a gigabit ethernet, which has a bit error rate of 10^-12, there will be a bit error once every 1000 seconds or once every 16 minutes. Luckely, most phys seem to have a much better BER than that. With the advent of 10G ethernet that number drops to 1.6 minutes. Good error detection (CRC-32) is useful here.
enough rambling for now...
-tpg
I just wanted to make sure you were aware that your crack addiction has become apparent to all /. readers...
I have worked in the automotive industry for years, and I am very familiar with manufacture processes and parts policies. Your "trackable tires" may work for trucking companies to keep track of their trucks, but if you think consumer vehicles have this technology in their tires, you're out to lunch!
Go do some more research and stop talking out of your backside.
"have a nice day"
Mod parent up
Funny how there was lots of Anthrax scares happening on a daily business, people getting sick all over the place and then poof , no leads, no one caught , no more attacks, no more questions.
what are the odds that a determined phsycopathic Anthrax killer just got bored ? yet with the entire FBI/CIA looking for them they still escaped,
or maybe something more sinister is going on ?
and did you see any wreckage of a plane at the pentagon in any of the photos taken ? cockpit ? wing ? fuselage ?
what are the odds of smashing a plane into the side of the pentagon (not exactly the height of the WTC) and no-one took a photo of plane wreckage at the scene ?
oops gotta go, a black car with some men in suits just pulled up, i'll be back in a minute....
you are a government stooge... read the links, see the chips, look at the sites, refer to the tires themselves.
its for CARS
I guess you are too old and "out of it" to know about the b-11 standards, or the chips already in many tires.
Mad cow disease. There's been outbreaks of something at least similar to mad cow disease for quite a while in areas outside of the U.K. This includes the United States where there are also cattle mutilations.
Now, suppose a rancher recognizes the symptoms. If he goes public he'll jeapordize his and other ranchers livelihood. If he does the right thing and slaughters his herd he'll be out a lot of money. If he claims that somebody (or something) else slaughters his herd than he can possibly get money from insurance.
There's chronic wasting disease, which is similar to Mad Cow Disease, in Wisconsin deer. They both have similar symptoms and are caused by prions.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
and i know what the next governemnt consppiracy is: they will take away our capital letters and newlines, so we will all have to write inpenetrable stream-of-consciousness screeds.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Holy shit. My wacky socialist friends aren't as paranoid as I thought. Holy shit.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Sure... it's all coincidence... That's just what THEY want you to believe. :-P
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If your are not part of the solution so be it! OK harsh but if you're a scientist involved with buidling killing you should be willing to die for what you do. End of Story! o-o.
Media trying to disprove a conspiracy?
Sounds like a conspiracy to me....
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
An interesting coincidence, no doubt, but nothing more than that.
Dijkestra was murdered becuase he made a cryptographic breakthrough and since he was now living overseas the americans decided he couldn't be trusted and snuffed him out.
Why doesn't it focus on the ones that actually preoccupy peoples' minds?
I've never even heard of this business with the microbiologists.
But what about TWA-800? There are a lot of people who think a missile brought that plane down, so why doesn't the Times investigate this?
Here is an Executive Order Bill Clinton signed the day after Paris Match released the radar tapes showing that something else was in the sky and closing on TWA-800's position. The order removes members of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group from the Whistleblower statutes. It is quite clearly an attempt on the part of the administration to cover-up the events surrounding TWA-800.
Neither the New York Times nor any other corporate media outlet chose to publish this fact, however. To a man they all dismiss the notion that a Navy missile brought down TWA-800 as nothing more than conspiracy theory.
By exposing this rather silly theory about the microbiologists being murdered their intent is to throw doubt on the many other theories that do merit our attention... that still hold the rank of conspiracy theory only because papers like The New York Times refuses to publish the truth.
This is a disgraceful story.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
*woke up* There were good candidates in the race?
Why do conspiracy theroies abound?
It's pretty simple: it's very hard for an unintelligent person to credit stupidity for something that could have been the result of malice.
-- Terry
The CIA Atrocities Timeline.
Enjoy.
Also i couldn't find the link but the CIA was planning to commit terrorist attacks on italy and then get an infltrated leftist group to claim credit to discredit the communist party. I lost the link, but the CIA Atrocities timeline does breifly address the CIAs corruption of italian democracy.
The scary part is history seems to be repeating istelf:
President Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. The CIA is accountable to the president through the NSC -- there is no democratic or congressional oversight. Its charter allows the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties... as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." This loophole opens the door to covert action and dirty tricks.
Sounds kinda familiar doesn't it?
Except the new agency will target americans instead of foreigners.
Another choice qoute:
The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."
You thought the communists did some nasty stuff? They don't have squat on the capitalists.
My favorite coincidence was the Superbowl Dow Jones correlation from Super Bowl I to superbowl 20 something. It turned out that if a pre-merger AFL team won the market went down, but if an old NFL team one the market went up. No causation, and the correlation hasn't held but it did for about 20 years.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
In other words, if you have 'paranoid friends', maybe their interpretation of things is a bit off, but there can still be facts they know of that aren't just made up. For instance, somebody might argue that McNamara vetoed the proposed plans to attack American citizens because (fill in Le Carre double twist explanation here). I think it was more a case of McNamara quietly screaming inside his head, "ARE YOU PEOPLE FUCKING CRAZY????" and vetoing the plans, hoping that the continuous rejection would settle the crazy people down. I picture him as being perfectly happy to wage war on Southeast Asia, perfectly happy to be resolutely anti-Communist, but still appalled at the idea of waging war on his own country to trick them into battle.
Like McNamara, you don't get the luxury of deciding, 'this is all good, this is all nuts, this is all bad'. You may be in a situation where some of the things you thought you could depend on are betraying you- much like McNamara, sworn to defend the United States and discovering subordinates busily preparing to wage war on their own country to manipulate it. Hopefully you can respond at least as well as he did- he did manage to turn off all of those plans, at the time, but had he been able to do more, we might be better off now.
Dr. Jacob Daley used to do a magic trick where he would determine the sex of someone's offspring from some convoluted mathematics; he was right about 50% of the time. When asked why he did this trick, his reply was "No one remembers the misses, but no one ever forgets the hits." Or words to that effect. Lots of things, like "Crossing Over", for instance, use this principle.
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line. -- Oscar Levant
"Remember the Maine?"
/mike.
Err, no I don't, to be honest. Probably because I'm a) younger than 100 an b) not a US citizen.
Can you explain what happened to that warship?
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
Okay, so here's the situation: everyone is stunned by an elaborate terrorist strike. There seems to be the beginnings of another one, and it's got something to do with your field of study. There are bad economic times, but your field is still somewhat in crazy startup mode.
What are the chances that you'll suddenly die of a stress-related illness?
Far more often than conspiracies, and probably competing well with coincidences, are the situations where people's perceptions of the situation actually significantly affects what happens. Remember, the placebo effect is significantly stronger for a number of conditions than the best medicine we know of. There are many conditions (including RSI) which turn out to be caused by a slight physical effect, a lot of stress, and the knowledge that the condition is common.
I have to point out something about the classroom experiment mentioned in the article. The students whose birthdays are the same as other students in the room reported being more surprised than the other students. But this is, of course, totally logical. As the article says, it takes over 200 people to have better than even odds that someone has your birthday. Therefore, you should be surprised whenever someone does. Of course, it's likely to happen to somebody. And so somebody should be surprised, and people who know this person (and not most of the others) should be a bit surprised, and most of the people should be totally unfazed.
Maybe, just maybe, Gore is a sucky candidate.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
How many of them were abducted, probed, impreganted with hybrid fetuses and implanted with tracking devieces before they were hunted down by the shadow government under the orders of the military- industrial complex?
A conspiracy is so much easier to explain than the truth. Read further down this thread for a detailed link about derbis. By the way what temperature does aluminum melt at? A lot less than the steel beams of the world trade center. Every throw an aluminum can into a camp fire? In a few minutes its melted and oxidized into almost nothing. Now what are most airplanes made from...?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Both are fat.
Both have a body odor problem.
Both made a few bucks in the computer business for a while and are now broke.
When his family made inquiries in 1975, Congress paid $750,000 in damages to the family. What was really weird was that during this time, a letter was sent between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who were working for Gerald Ford at the time, saying that if there was a trial, it could be "necessary to disclose top secret information concerning national security".
These guys are at the top today, and since assassination and cover-ups (even specifically regarding biological warfare) clearly are not foreign to them, I don't see why the default theory should be an extremely improbable coincidence.
It took what, $40,000,000 and three years to nail that one down? I'd say that example goes directly against your point.
Thank you for your sig. I had been meaning to download and participate in this for quite some time. I am the AC who wrote the previous post, which was indeed stream and haphazzard, and also my first post ever. It is however, the truth. Just because most of the x-files were mostly fictional, does not mean they were not representative of the way things really are. I have personally found, while searching for flint to sell to guy who makes arrowheads, a clear sphere about 1/8 in. diameter. Later that night something came in my house, knocked out my power, and took the sphere. I do no drugs, I am not an idiot to my knowledge, and I am not an outright liar. Things are indeed going on that most of us would never accept as real, but that does not change the fact. I am not an english proffesor, but I can see how my post is formatted poorly. Thank you for calling my attention. I hope to figure out the system here so that I may become a more effective communicator. Protiens are a foldin as we speak. Gracious Senior
Well it was docked in Havana's (Cuba) harbor to protect American property and to be ready to ferry out American nationals, and then it blew up during a rather intense period of sabre rattling. An inquest board was formed, and after a month or so they reported back that the explosion was the work of an external explosive device, according to the inquest probably a Spanish mine. This was coupled with the tabloid jounralism at the time (which didn't wait for the inquest to be over to blame the Spanish) to form a popular cause for intervention in Cuba; oh and BTW all that agitation was formed in part by the Cuban exiles feeding stories, so the US has long been controlled by Cuban exiles see. Anyways, demands were made, and the Spanish ceded to the demands but the declaration of war passed the Spanish cession in tranist (some say intentionally).
Anyways the Maine was eventully looked at in the 1930s or so. Vauge mutterings were made, and the wreck was towed out of the harbor into deep water and sunk, so that no one could look at it too closely. Then later technology got to the point where the wreck could be rexamined and it was found that source of the explosion was iternal. Current thinking is that the coal dust in the coal bunker exploded, ie. an accident.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
What you never heard of the bay of pigs?
Failed coup attempt by the CIA...pretty famous.
First time america found out about the monster the capitalists (rockefeller and cronies had a huge hand in creating the CIA to fight communism[read: Protect their assets])had created.
The Cuba thing didn't work out at least.
In Guatamala a leftist government threatened to nationalize a rockefeller owned fruit business. The people where sick of getting exploited by the american elites and finally elected someone to do something about it. Well since Rockefeller was also an insider in the CIA he simply had them stage a right wing coup. Tens of thousands of Guatamalans died in purges of communists, but hey at least the capitalists assets where safe....
Sounds crazy, but hey it's all out there in fact, get your freedom of information act on and check it out for yourself.
I can't wait till i'm 70 and i can see what crazy shit they are doing right now to protect american oil and technology interests!
[...] But the actual answer is 23. [...]
hm, i always get told the answer is 42...
if you've got nothing to say, don't tell me.
"What if there are no coincidences?"
Mod the parent post up immediately.
I insist that you mod the parent up.
The solution to this is simple. Place a tinfoil barrier around your tires. Presto, no more transmissions.
But of course "the man" will stop you at the border when you drive up with tinfoil around your tires, because he's trying to keep you down, and he's scared when you know the truth.
Joking aside, the problem I have with this article is that it is applying statistics where there is not enough information to apply statistics. If we were talking about pulling marbles out of a bag then, sure, plug away with statistics.
:)
But we're talking about coincidences in a chaotic environment. You simply can't apply statistics to these situations without thousands of simplifying assumptions.
Take the example in the story of a bird landing on the boy's head. Can you imagine trying to compute the probabiliy for this kind of an event. Compute the probability of him grabbing the bird given that the bird landed on his head given that he just said the word "mother" given that he was giving a speech about his mother dying.
Now I'm no writer but I can imagine millions of other ways this could have turned out. For example, the bird lands on his head and he freaks out and falls down some stairs to his death. Even if we ignore the part about his mother dying, what are the probabilities that a boy is giving a speech and a bird lands on his head. Certainly it could happen but how would you ever calculate a probability for it. Its madness.
That's just an example so don't get hung up with that particular example. If someone thinks they can calculate these kinds of probabilities, the department of homeland security would love to have you
Never underestimate the power of fiber.
Here you are, my friends!
NYTimes Random Login Generator
Enjoy!
The funniest thing happened to me quite a while back. If was driving in my car and thinking something, when the next word in my thought "appeared" on a billboard. Then I noticed again about a month later, then again, then agian. I evern wrote them down for a while. Friday it happened twice in an a hour. One ofthem was that I was thnking about a SpongeBob Squarepants episode(animated children's television) where this fish king says, "Why did you stop playing that music? Such beauty". As i thought the word beauty, I read it on a sign over a business. I guess it's not that big a deal, given the number of words used commonly by people, but it's still really wierd to think and see it at the EXACT same instant.
The only conspiracy story I like goes along the lines of...
"All the conspiracy theories are started by the government to keep all the nutters of the world worring about all sorts of crazy stuff. This way they will never notice now fucked the operations of government really are"
well when blender goes Open it will be better than lightwave so pffft !
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
can be used to prove or disprove anything.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I attribute the gullibility of conspiracy theorists to pure psychology. It's called intermittent (partial) reinforcement. It's the same reason many people are addicted to gambling.
Rewards (in the case of conspiracy theorists, the reward is being right) in intermittant reinforcement are not given every time a particular behavior is performed, but rather once in a while, and for best results, at a variable rate, rather than a fixed rate.
This is the reason you don't feed stray animals on the street, because they will occasionally be rewarded, and so it will stick in their heads that they should visit a particular place to get food. If you feed that stray animal after each visit or at a fixed rate, it will be easier to get off your back once you stop. However, with intermittant reinforcement, it will take a long time to get the animal off your back since it will continue to expect that one day you will feed it.
Conspiracy theorists have been right in the past (mere statistics will prove this, as this article makes note of), and that is enough to get large numbers of people convinced enough that others are worth their time and energy to prove correct.
Gullible they may be, but they have history to blame for that.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Was it an engineered? As a bioweapon?
How about my bike? Is it safe? A bicycle I mean, not a motorcycle.
So, the steel belts are used as a T-R antenna? Wouldn't it be easy to bring your tires to an inductive heater and blow up the chip that way?
And where would all the transceivers be? How to coordinate them all? How to track which tires belong to whom? How about arrangeing it so that you buy your friends tires and vice versa and then swap them?
The chain of probabilities was incredible. It took days of 3D computer simulation coupled with ballistics analysis to work out what had happened - yet it happened and someone died as a result. The guy that fired the pistol didn't even realise his gun had fired twice.
I guess they though it was just too bloody obvious to point out how many people may have decided to go into work early because they had plans that evening or something similar and thus were "miraculously" killed. Of course we never heard from those guys telling us how unlucky they were.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Professor Robins of Harvard points out that "the Web has changed the scale of these things." Had there been a string of dead scientists back in 1992 rather than 2002, he says, it is possible that no one would have ever known. "Back then, you would not have had the technical ability to gather all these bits and pieces of information, while today you'd be able to pull it off. It's well known that if you take a lot of random noise, you can find chance patterns in it, and the Net makes it easier to collect random noise."
:
... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.
Unfortunately, DARPA is now in the process of designing the TIA (Total Information Awareness) system (here and here)
It's a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures -- clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards
So, in other words, the TIA system is DESIGNED to attempt to find pattens in a few petbytes of random noise.
Those claims that Hitler was a man of peace are simply ridicilous. Do you really think Germany invaded countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, etc. to preserve peace? If he ever tried to avoid war with major european powers like England, France or the Soviet Union, this was simply for tactical reasons. Nazi Germany has broken more or less every single treaty it signed, both in letter and in spirit.
The article indirectly cites some guy saying " Hitler was not thinking of war [...] as the Führer's immense social and cultural plans would take years to fulfill". These immense social and cultural plans consisted in robbing, enslaving and murdering some ten millions of people, as well as crushing any political opposition. The leaders of germany at that time were nothing but criminals, acting on global scale. It's that simple.
If you are really interested in evidence, check out original sources. In this case, I recommend to read Hitler's "Mein Kampf". This book has been printed millions of times and distributed to more or less every household in the third reich, so you can be pretty sure it is authentic. (OK, it is written in german, as a matter of fact in pretty poor german, so reading it might be difficult for you). This book was written long before Hitler seized the power. It states pretty clear his plans to kill and enslave "inferor races" and to fight a war to avenge the german defeat in WW I. Everybody who tries to deny this is simply a liar or a moron.
Please do not believe everything just because some URL says it is true. Just like in coding: "Use the source, Luke."
sig intentionally left blank
that the hole billonlyUS fairytail "economy" is FraUDuleNT bs designed to help make a handful of felons, & "OUR" "elected represeNTatives" immune from the legal systern, while leading J. Public into decades of unpayabull debt.
do you know where what's left of your money is going today?
whois tallying the score when you type in (free to paid subscribers?) the conteNTs of your "dream portfolio"?
The USS Maine was sunk in 1898, resulting in the U.S. attacking Spanish colonial interests. In 1912, the Maine was raised, investigated by the U.S. and then scuttled. These are the known facts. The conspiracy theories arise over the question of who or what sunk the ship. Did the U.S. intentionally sink the ship to provide a reason to attack Spain's colonies? Hmmm.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
nice try commie...but everyone knows the bullshite left slant of commiedot...
Ah, I see.. Thanks! /xm
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
The article is misleading. Listen, if everybody in the US toss their coins a few would get a large number 6 heads in a row (1 in a 64 chance). Yes, that is the law of large numbers at play. But if you have a coin and toss it six times and you get six heads, teh reasonable thing, ask any statistician, is to have the coin check for fairness... Coincidence happens, yes, but that doesn't mean you should just shrug your shoulder and ignore them...
The case of death related to biotechnology should be investigate. It may be a coincidence, but after the investigation you can get clues as to whether it is just that.
"Place a tinfoil barrier...
"the man" will stop you...
he's trying to keep you down...
when you know the truth..."
strike four...no arguement,just insults...i guess we know who's right then...
Efron is a venerable statistician, but this is plain wrong. There are many things that are so unlikely that, for practical purposes, they simply do not occur in this universe. For example, all the air molecules in a room don't all get on one half of the room, leaving the other half with a vacuum. Statistically, this arrangement is (approximately) as probable as any other. But there aren't enough rooms in the universe to make this an event that could occur with "fairly high" probability.
Much of physics relies on things that are "astronomically unlikely", and much of engineering consists of changing conditions so that something that is very unlikely becomes common. We have enshrined these "astronomically unlikely" principle as a the laws of thermodynamics, and we don't even bother to say "a perpetual motion machine is possible but very, very unlikely", we just say "you can't build one", because for practical purposes, you can't.
[Tibshirani] ''The chance of getting a royal flush is very low,'' he says, ''and if you were to get a royal flush, you would be surprised. But the chance of any hand in poker is low. You just don't notice when you get all the others; you notice when you get the royal flush.''
This is true but not relevant. If you randomly think of some particular hand and then have it dealt, you do have reason to be surprised, although, since the prior probability on the existence ESP or telekinesis is so minute, you should probably still attribute it to randomness. On the other hand, you have no reason to be surprised if you get a royal flush once over many games, just like you have no reason to be surprised to get any particular hand once in many games.
Similarly, statistically, having all the air molecules in a room be present only on one side of the room is (approximately) as probable as any other particular arrangement of air molecules, but I guarantee that if you were in that room, you would notice, and you would have reason to be surprised. In fact, you would almost certainly be correct in concluding that that arrangement of air molecules didn't come about by chance but involved something like a vacuum pump and a partition.
Which brings us to the death of Benito Que, who was not, despite reports to the contrary, actually a microbiologist. He was a researcher in a lab at the University of Miami Sylvester Cancer Center, where he was testing various agents as potential cancer drugs.
Now we are getting to the good stuff. The problem with the conspiracy surrounding these cases has nothing to do with statistics or people's ignorance of it.
The death of half a dozen germ warfare experts under the age of 60 within a span of four months would be an unlikely event, whether or not it follows 9/11. Not astronomically unlikely, but something that would certainly warrant closer investigation. If you assume that there are maybe 100 such world experts, you can look at standard mortality tables to bound the probability of this event occurring.
What's wrong with that analysis is that these people were not "germ warfare specialists"--they were biologists. Journalists constructed the label "germ warfare specialists" after the fact. But there are a lot of biologists in the world. The death of half a dozen biologists over a four month period is a much more probable event--simply because there are a lot more biologists around.
I hate these typical stupid comprisons death00, "if the govt cant keep X secret what makes you think Z is..." thats a big bolony
Do yo know how many secrets they do have and that if you 'break the rules' and let the info free you get JAILED FOR LIFE or SENTENCED TO DEATH!
Dude, the govt/military has shit loads of secrets, one being CIA operatives in countries, and launch codes to nukes, details on how to refine uranium perfectly, encryption codes...
Yeah and let me point out, the moment some one does of real do reveal some secrets im sure the CIA is watching and make sure they 'accidentally' get knifed or run over by a train or total discredit them.
CIA has operatives working at CNN too dude.
go to abovetopsecret.com and globalsecurity.org
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
(ho hum... waiting 18 seconds... tick tock....)
August 11, 2002
The Odds of That
By LISA BELKIN
When the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side street, near the empty spot where he had habitually parked his Ford Explorer. At about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a white rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of Memphis, where he had just had a jovial dinner with friends. The following week, Vladimir Pasechnik collapsed in London, apparently of a stroke.
The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four nerve-jangling months. Stabbed in Leesburg, Va. Suffocated in an air-locked lab in Geelong, Australia. Found wedged under a chair, naked from the waist down, in a blood-splattered apartment in Norwich, England. Hit by a car while jogging. Killed in a private plane crash. Shot dead while a pizza delivery man served as a decoy.
What joined these men was their proximity to the world of bioterror and germ warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked, was a researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as anyone about how the immune system responds to attacks from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was Russian, and before he defected, he helped the Soviets transform cruise missiles into biological weapons. The chain of deaths -- these three men and eight others like them -- began last fall, back when emergency teams in moonsuits were scouring the Capitol, when postal workers were dying, when news agencies were on high alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its mail.
In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths might not have been noticed, but these are not ordinary times. Neighbors report neighbors to the F.B.I.; passengers are escorted off planes because they make other passengers nervous; medical journals debate what to publish, for fear the articles will be read by evil eyes. Now we are spooked and startled by stories like these -- all these scientists dying within months of one another, at the precise moment when tiny organisms loom as a gargantuan threat. The stories of these dozen or so deaths started out as a curiosity and were transformed rumor by rumor into the specter of conspiracy as they circulated first on the Internet and then in the mainstream media. What are the odds, after all?
What are the odds, indeed?
For this is not about conspiracy but about coincidence -- unexpected connections that are both riveting and rattling. Much religious faith is based on the idea that almost nothing is coincidence; science is an exercise in eliminating the taint of coincidence; police work is often a feint and parry between those trying to prove coincidence and those trying to prove complicity. Without coincidence, there would be few movies worth watching (''Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine''), and literary plots would come grinding to a disappointing halt. (What if Oedipus had not happened to marry his mother? If Javert had not happened to arrive in the town where Valjean was mayor?)
The true meaning of the word is ''a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.'' In other words, pure happenstance. Yet by merely noticing a coincidence, we elevate it to something that transcends its definition as pure chance. We are discomforted by the idea of a random universe. Like Mel Gibson's character Graham Hess in M. Night Shyamalan's new movie ''Signs,'' we want to feel that our lives are governed by a grand plan.
The need is especially strong in an age when paranoia runs rampant. ''Coincidence feels like a loss of control perhaps,'' says John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of ''Innumeracy,'' the improbable best seller about how Americans don't understand numbers. Finding a reason or a pattern where none actually exists ''makes it less frightening,'' he says, because events get placed in the realm of the logical. ''Believing in fate, or even conspiracy, can sometimes be more comforting than facing the fact that sometimes things just happen.''
In the past year there has been plenty of conspiracy, of course, but also a lot of things have ''just happened.'' And while our leaders are out there warning us to be vigilant, the statisticians are out there warning that patterns are not always what they seem. We need to be reminded, Paulos and others say, that most of the time patterns that seem stunning to us aren't even there. For instance, although the numbers 9/11 (9 plus 1 plus 1) equal 11, and American Airlines Flight 11 was the first to hit the twin towers, and there were 92 people on board (9 plus 2), and Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year (2 plus 5 plus 4), and there are 11 letters each in ''Afghanistan,'' ''New York City'' and ''the Pentagon'' (and while we're counting, in George W. Bush), and the World Trade towers themselves took the form of the number 11, this seeming numerical message is not actually a pattern that exists but merely a pattern we have found. (After all, the second flight to hit the towers was United Airlines Flight 175, and the one that hit the Pentagon was American Airlines Flight 77, and the one that crashed in a Pennsylvania field was United Flight 93, and the Pentagon is shaped, well, like a pentagon.)
The same goes for the way we think of miraculous intervention. We need to be told that those lucky last-minute stops for an Egg McMuffin at McDonald's or to pick up a watch at the repair shop or to vote in the mayoral primary -- stops that saved lives of people who would otherwise have been in the towers when the first plane hit -- certainly looked like miracles but could have been predicted by statistics. So, too, can the most breathtaking of happenings -- like the sparrow that happened to appear at one memorial service just as a teenage boy, at the lectern eulogizing his mom, said the word ''mother.'' The tiny bird lighted on the boy's head; then he took it in his hand and set it free.
Something like that has to be more than coincidence, we protest. What are the odds? The mathematician will answer that even in the most unbelievable situations, the odds are actually very good. The law of large numbers says that with a large enough denominator -- in other words, in a big wide world -- stuff will happen, even very weird stuff. ''The really unusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens,'' explains Persi Diaconis, a Stanford statistician who has spent his career collecting and studying examples of coincidence. Given that there are 280 million people in the United States, he says, ''280 times a day, a one-in-a-million shot is going to occur.''
Throw your best story at him -- the one about running into your childhood playmate on a street corner in Azerbaijan or marrying a woman who has a birthmark shaped like a shooting star that is a perfect match for your own or dreaming that your great-aunt Lucy would break her collarbone hours before she actually does -- and he will nod politely and answer that such things happen all the time. In fact, he and his colleagues also warn me that although I pulled all examples in the prior sentence from thin air, I will probably get letters from readers saying one of those things actually happened to them.
And what of the deaths of nearly a dozen scientists? Is it really possible that they all just happened to die, most in such peculiar, jarring ways, within so short a time? ''We can never say for a fact that something isn't a conspiracy,'' says Bradley Efron, a professor of statistics at Stanford. ''We can just point out the odds that it isn't.''
I first found myself wondering about coincidence last spring when I read a small news item out of the tiny Finnish town of Raahe, which is 370 miles north of Helsinki. On the morning of March 5, two elderly twin brothers were riding their bicycles, as was their habit, completing their separate errands. At 9:30, one brother was struck by a truck along coastal Highway 8 and killed instantly. About two hours later and one mile down the same highway, the other brother was struck by a second truck and killed.
''It was hard to believe this could happen just by chance,'' says Marko Salo, the senior constable who investigated both deaths for the Raahe Police Department. Instead, the department looked for a cause, thinking initially that the second death was really a suicide.
''Almost all Raahe thought he did it knowing that his brother was dead,'' Salo says of the second brother's death. ''They thought he tried on purpose. That would have explained things.'' But the investigation showed that the older brother was off cheerfully getting his hair cut just before his own death.
The family could not immediately accept that this was random coincidence, either. ''It was their destiny,'' offers their nephew, who spoke with me on behalf of the family. It is his opinion that his uncles shared a psychic bond throughout their lives. When one brother became ill, the other one fell ill shortly thereafter. When one reached to scratch his nose, the other would often do the same. Several years ago, one brother was hit and injured by a car (also while biking), and the other one developed pain in the same leg.
The men's sister had still another theory entirely. ''She worried that it was a plot to kill both of them,'' the nephew says, describing his aunt's concerns that terrorists might have made their way to Raahe. ''She was angry. She wanted to blame someone. So she said the chances of this happening by accident are impossible.''
Not true, the statisticians say. But before we can see the likelihood for what it is, we have to eliminate the distracting details. We are far too taken, Efron says, with superfluous facts and findings that have no bearing on the statistics of coincidence. After our initial surprise, Efron says that the real yardstick for measuring probability is ''How surprised should we be?'' How surprising is it, to use this example, that two 70-year-old men in the same town should die within two hours of each other? Certainly not common, but not unimaginable. But the fact that they were brothers would seem to make the odds more astronomical. This, however, is a superfluous fact. What is significant in their case is that two older men were riding bicycles along a busy highway in a snowstorm, which greatly increases the probability that they would be hit by trucks.
Statisticians like Efron emphasize that when something striking happens, it only incidentally happens to us. When the numbers are large enough, and the distracting details are removed, the chance of anything is fairly high. Imagine a meadow, he says, and then imagine placing your finger on a blade of grass. The chance of choosing exactly that blade of grass would be one in a million or even higher, but because it is a certainty that you will choose a blade of grass, the odds of one particular one being chosen are no more or less than the one to either side.
Robert J. Tibshirani, a statistician at Stanford University who proved that it was probably not coincidence that accident rates increase when people simultaneously drive and talk on a cellphone, leading some states to ban the practice, uses the example of a hand of poker. ''The chance of getting a royal flush is very low,'' he says, ''and if you were to get a royal flush, you would be surprised. But the chance of any hand in poker is low. You just don't notice when you get all the others; you notice when you get the royal flush.''
When these professors talk, they do so slowly, aware that what they are saying is deeply counterintuitive. No sooner have they finished explaining that the world is huge and that any number of unlikely things are likely to happen than they shift gears and explain that the world is also quite small, which explains an entire other type of coincidence. One relatively simple example of this is ''the birthday problem.'' There are as many as 366 days in a year (accounting for leap years), and so you would have to assemble 367 people in a room to absolutely guarantee that two of them have the same birthday. But how many people would you need in that room to guarantee a 50 percent chance of at least one birthday match?
Intuitively, you assume that the answer should be a relatively large number. And in fact, most people's first guess is 183, half of 366. But the actual answer is 23. In Paulos's book, he explains the math this way: ''[T]he number of ways in which five dates can be chosen (allowing for repetitions) is (365 x 365 x 365 x 365 x 365). Of all these 3655 ways, however, only (365 x 364 x 363 x 362 x 361) are such that no two of the dates are the same; any of the 365 days can be chosen first, any of the remaining 364 can be chosen second and so on. Thus, by dividing this latter product (365 x 364 x 363 x 362 x 361) by 3655, we get the probability that five persons chosen at random will have no birthday in common. Now, if we subtract this probability from 1 (or from 100 percent if we're dealing with percentages), we get the complementary probability that at least two of the five people do have a birthday in common. A similar calculation using 23 rather than 5 yields 1/2, or 50 percent, as the probability that at least 2 of 23 people will have a common birthday.''
Got that?
Using similar math, you can calculate that if you want even odds of finding two people born within one day of each other, you only need 14 people, and if you are looking for birthdays a week apart, the magic number is seven. (Incidentally, if you are looking for an even chance that someone in the room will have your exact birthday, you will need 253 people.) And yet despite numbers like these, we are constantly surprised when we meet a stranger with whom we share a birth date or a hometown or a middle name. We are amazed by the overlap -- and we conveniently ignore the countless things we do not have in common.
Which brings us to the death of Benito Que, who was not, despite reports to the contrary, actually a microbiologist. He was a researcher in a lab at the University of Miami Sylvester Cancer Center, where he was testing various agents as potential cancer drugs. He never worked with anthrax or any infectious disease, according to Dr. Bach Ardalan, a professor of medicine at the University of Miami and Que's boss for the past three years. ''There is no truth to the talk that Benito was doing anything related to microbiology,'' Ardalan says. ''He certainly wasn't doing any sensitive kind of work that anyone would want to hurt him for.''
But those facts got lost amid the confusion -- and the prevalence of very distracting details -- in the days after he died. So did the fact that he had hypertension. On the afternoon of Monday, Nov. 19, Que attended a late-afternoon lab meeting, and as it ended, he mentioned that he hadn't been feeling well. A nurse took Que's blood pressure, which was 190/110. ''I wanted to admit him'' to the hospital, Ardalan says, but Que insisted on going home.
Que had the habit of parking his car on Northwest 10th Avenue, a side street that Ardalan describes as being ''beyond the area considered to be safe.'' His spot that day was in front of a house where a young boy was playing outside. Four youths approached Que as he neared his car, the boy later told the police, and there might have been some baseball bats involved. When the police arrived, they found Que unconscious. His briefcase was at his side, but his wallet was gone. His car was eventually found abandoned several miles from the scene. He was taken to the hospital, the same one at which he worked, where he spent more than a week in a coma before dying without ever regaining consciousness.
The mystery, limited to small items in local Florida papers at first, was ''What killed Benito Que?'' Could it have been the mugging? A CAT scan showed no signs of bony fracture. In fact, there were no scrapes or bruises or other physical signs of assault. Perhaps he died of a stroke? His brain scan did show a ''huge intracranial bleed,'' Ardalan says, which would have explained his earlier headache, and his high blood pressure would have made a stroke likely.
In other words, this man just happened to be mugged when he was a stroke waiting to be triggered. That is a jarring coincidence, to be sure. But it is not one that the world was likely to have noticed if Don Wiley had not up and disappeared.
Don C. Wiley was a microbiologist. He did some work with anthrax, and a lot of work with H.I.V., and he was also quite familiar with Ebola, smallpox, herpes and influenza. At 57, he was the father of four children and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the department of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard.
On Nov. 15, four days before the attack on Benito Que, Wiley was in Memphis to visit his father and to attend the annual meeting of the scientific advisory board of St. Jude's Research Hospital, of which he was a member. At midnight, he was seen leaving a banquet at the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. Friends and colleagues say he had a little to drink but did not appear impaired, and they remember him as being in a fine mood, looking forward to seeing his wife and children, who were about to join him for a short vacation.
Wiley's father lives in a Memphis suburb, and that is where Wiley should have been headed after the banquet. Instead, his car was found facing in the opposite direction on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River at the border of Tennessee and Arkansas. When the police found the car at 4 a.m., it was unlocked, the keys were in the ignition and the gas tank was full. There was a scrape of yellow paint on the driver's side, which appeared to come from a construction sign on the bridge, and a right hubcap was missing on the passenger side, where the wheel rims were also scraped. There was no sign, however, of Don Wiley.
The police trawled the muddy Mississippi, but they didn't really expect to find him. Currents run fast at that part of the river, and a body would be quickly swept away. At the start of the search, they thought he might have committed suicide; others had jumped from the DeSoto Bridge over the years. Detectives searched Wiley's financial records, his family relationships, his scientific research -- anything for a hint that the man might have had cause to take his own life.
Finding nothing, the investigation turned medical. Wiley, they learned, had a seizure disorder that he had hidden from all but family and close friends. He had a history of two or three major episodes a year, his wife told investigators, and the condition was made worse when he was under stress or the influence of alcohol. Had Wiley, who could well have been tired, disoriented by bridge construction and under the influence of a few drinks, had a seizure that sent him over the side of the bridge?
That was the theory the police spoke of in public, but they were also considering something else. The week that Wiley disappeared coincided with the peak of anthrax fear throughout the country. Tainted letters appeared the month before at the Senate and the House of Representatives. Two weeks earlier, a New York City hospital worker died of inhaled anthrax. Memphis was not untouched by the scare; a federal judge and two area congressmen each received hoax letters. Could it be mere chance that this particular scientist, who had profound knowledge of these microbes, had disappeared at this time?
''The circumstances were peculiar,'' says George Bolds, a spokesman for the Memphis bureau of the F.B.I., which was called in to assist. ''There were questions that had to be asked. Could he have been kidnapped because his scientific abilities would have made him capable of creating anthrax? Or maybe he'd had some involvement in the mailing of the anthrax, and he'd disappeared to cover his tracks? Did his co-conspirators grab him and kill him?
''We were in new territory,'' Bolds continued. ''Just because something is conceivable doesn't mean it's actually happened, but at the same time, just because it's never happened before doesn't mean it can't happen. People's ideas of what is possible definitely changed on Sept. 11. People feel less secure and less safe. I'm not sure that they're at greater risk than they were before. Maybe they're just more aware of the risk they are actually at.''
As a species, we appear to be biologically programmed to see patterns and conspiracies, and this tendency increases when we sense that we're in danger. ''We are hard-wired to overreact to coincidences,'' says Persi Diaconis. ''It goes back to primitive man. You look in the bush, it looks like stripes, you'd better get out of there before you determine the odds that you're looking at a tiger. The cost of being flattened by the tiger is high. Right now, people are noticing any kind of odd behavior and being nervous about it.''
Adds John Allen Paulos: ''Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It might just be part of our biology that conspires to make coincidences more meaningful than they really are. Look at the natural world of rocks and plants and rivers: it doesn't offer much evidence for superfluous coincidences, but primitive man had to be alert to all anomalies and respond to them as if they were real.''
For decades, all academic talk of coincidence has been in the context of the mathematical. New work by scientists like Joshua B. Tenenbaum, an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T., is bringing coincidence into the realm of human cognition. Finding connections is not only the way we react to the extraordinary, Tenenbaum postulates, but also the way we make sense of our ordinary world. ''Coincidences are a window into how we learn about things,'' he says. ''They show us how minds derive richly textured knowledge from limited situations.''
To put it another way, our reaction to coincidence shows how our brains fill in the factual blanks. In an optical illusion, he explains, our brain fills the gaps, and although people take it for granted that seeing is believing, optical illusions prove that's not true. ''Illusions also prove that our brain is capable of imposing structure on the world,'' he says. ''One of the things our brain is designed to do is infer the causal structure of the world from limited information.''
If not for this ability, he says, a child could not learn to speak. A child sees a conspiracy, he says, in that others around him are obviously communicating and it is up to the child to decode the method. But these same mechanisms can misfire, he warns. They were well suited to a time of cavemen and tigers and can be overloaded in our highly complex world. ''It's why we have the urge to work everything into one big grand scheme,'' he says. ''We do like to weave things together.
''But have we evolved into fundamentally rational or fundamentally irrational creatures? That is one of the central questions.''
We pride ourselves on being independent and original, and yet our reactions to nearly everything can be plotted along a predictable spectrum. When the grid is coincidences, one end of the scale is for those who believe that these are entertaining events with no meaning; at the other end are those who believe that coincidence is never an accident.
The view of coincidence as fate has lately become something of a minitrend in the New Age section of bookstores. Among the more popular authors is SQuire Rushnell (who, in the interest of marketing, spells his first name with a capital Q). Rushnell spent 20 years producing such television programs as ''Good Morning America'' and ''Schoolhouse Rock.'' His fascination with coincidence began when he learned that both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same July 4, 50 years after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence.
''That stuck in my craw,'' Rushnell says, ''and I couldn't stop wondering what that means.'' And so Rushnell wrote ''When God Winks: How the Power of Coincidence Guides Your Life.'' The book was published by a small press shortly before Sept. 11 and sold well without much publicity. It will be rereleased with great fanfare by Simon & Schuster next month. Its message, Rushnell says, is that ''coincidences are signposts along your universal pathway. They are hints that you are going in the right direction or that you should change course. It's like your grandmother sitting across the Thanksgiving table from you and giving you a wink. What does that wink mean? 'I'm here, I love you, stay the course.'''
During my interview with Rushnell, I told him the following story: On a frigid December night many years ago, a friend dragged me out of my warm apartment, where I planned to spend the evening in my bathrobe nursing a cold. I had to come with her to the movies, she said, because she had made plans with a pal from her office, and he was bringing a friend for me to meet. Translation: I was expected to show up for a last-minute blind date. For some reason, I agreed to go, knocking back a decongestant as I left home. We arrived at the theater to find that the friend who was supposed to be my ''date'' had canceled, but not to worry, another friend had been corralled as a replacement. The replacement and I both fell asleep in the movie (I was sedated by cold medicine; he was a medical resident who had been awake for 36 hours), but four months later we were engaged, and we have been married for nearly 15 years.
Rushnell was enthralled by this tale, particularly by the mystical force that seemed to have nudged me out the door when I really wanted to stay home and watch ''The Golden Girls.'' I know that those on the other end of the spectrum -- the scientists and mathematicians -- would have offered several overlapping explanations of why it was unremarkable.
There are, of course, the laws of big numbers and small numbers -- the fact that the world is simultaneously so large that anything can happen and so small that weird things seem to happen all the time. Add to that the work of the late Amos Tversky, a giant in the field of coincidence theory, who once described his role in this world as ''debugging human intuition.'' Among other things, Tversky disproved the ''hot hand'' theory of basketball, the belief that a player who has made his last few baskets will more likely than not make his next. After examining thousands of shots by the Philadelphia 76ers, he proved that the odds of a successful shot cannot be predicted by the shots that came before.
Tversky similarly proved that arthritis sufferers cannot actually predict the weather and are not in more pain when there's a storm brewing, a belief that began with the ancient Greeks. He followed 18 patients for 15 months, keeping detailed records of their reports of pain and joint swelling and matching them with constantly updated weather reports. There was no pattern, he concluded, though he also conceded that his data would not change many people's beliefs.
We believe in such things as hot hands and arthritic forecasting and predestined blind dates because we notice only the winning streaks, only the chance meetings that lead to romance, only the days that Grandma's hands ache before it rains. ''We forget all the times that nothing happens,'' says Ruma Falk, a professor emeritus of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who studied years ago with Tversky. ''Dreams are another example,'' Falk says. ''We dream a lot. Every night and every morning. But it sometimes happens that the next day something reminds you of that dream. Then you think it was a premonition.''
Falk's work is focused on the question of why we are so entranced by coincidence in the first place. Her research itself began with a coincidence. She was on sabbatical in New York from her native Israel, and on the night before Rosh Hashana she happened to meet a friend from Jerusalem on a Manhattan street corner. She and the friend stood on that corner and marveled at the coincidence. What is the probability of this happening? she remembers wondering. What did this mean?
''How stupid we were,'' Falk says now, ''to be so surprised. We related to all the details that had converged to create that moment. But the real question was what was the probability that at some time in some place I would meet one of my circle of friends? And when I told this story to others at work, they encoded the events as two Israelis meeting in New York, something that happens all the time.''
Why was her experience so resonant for her, Falk asked herself, but not for those around her? One of the many experiments she has conducted since then proceeded as follows: she visited several large university classes, with a total of 200 students, and asked each student to write his or her birth date on a card. She then quietly sorted the cards and found the handful of birthdays that students had in common. Falk wrote those dates on the blackboard. April 10, for instance, Nov. 8, Dec. 16. She then handed out a second card and asked all the students to use a scale to rate how surprised they were by these coincidences.
The cards were numbered, so Falk could determine which answers came from respondents who found their own birth date written on the board. Those in that subgroup were consistently more surprised by the coincidence than the rest of the students. ''It shows the stupid power of personal involvement,'' Falk says.
The more personal the event, the more meaning we give it, which is why I am quite taken with my story of meeting my husband (because it is a pivotal moment in my life), and why SQuire Rushnell is also taken with it (because it fits into the theme of his book), but also why Falk is not impressed at all. She likes her own story of the chance meeting on a corner better than my story, while I think her story is a yawn.
The fact that personal attachment adds significance to an event is the reason we tend to react so strongly to the coincidences surrounding Sept. 11. In a deep and lasting way, that tragedy feels as if it happened to us all.
Falk's findings also shed light on the countless times that pockets of the general public find themselves at odds with authorities and statisticians. Her results might explain, for instance, why lupus patients are certain their breast implants are the reason for their illness, despite the fact that epidemiologists conclude there is no link, or why parents of autistic children are resolute in their belief that childhood immunizations or environmental toxins or a host of other suspected pathogens are the cause, even though experts are skeptical. They might also explain the outrage of all the patients who are certain they live in a cancer cluster, but who have been told otherwise by researchers.
Let's be clear: this does not mean that conspiracies do not sometimes exist or that the
environment never causes clusters of death. And just as statistics are often used to show us that we should not be surprised, they can also prove what we suspect, that something is wrong out there.
''The fact that so many suspected cancer clusters have turned out to be statistically insupportable does not mean the energy we spent looking for them has been wasted,'' says Dr. James M. Robins, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Harvard and an expert on cancer clusters. ''You're never going to find the real ones if you don't look at all the ones that don't turn out to be real ones.''
Most often, though, coincidence is a sort of Rorschach test. We look into it and find what we already believe. ''It's like an archer shooting an arrow and then drawing a circle around it,'' Falk says. ''We give it meaning because it does mean something -- to us.''
Vladimir Pasechnik was 64 when he died. His early career was spent in the Soviet Union working at Biopreparat, the site of that country's biological weapons program. He defected in 1989 and spilled what he knew to the British, revealing for the first time the immense scale of Soviet work with anthrax, plague, tularemia and smallpox.
For the next 10 years, he worked at the Center for Applied Microbiology and Research, part of Britain's Department of Health. Two years ago, he left to form Regma Biotechnologies, whose goal was to develop treatment for tuberculosis and other infectious disease. In the weeks before he died, Pasechnik had reportedly consulted with authorities about the growing anthrax scare. Despite all these intriguing details, there is nothing to suggest that his death was caused by anything other than a stroke.
Robert Schwartz's death, while far more dramatic and bizarre, also appears to have nothing to do with the fact that he was an expert on DNA sequencing and analysis. On Dec. 10 he was found dead on the kitchen floor of his isolated log-and-fieldstone farmhouse near Leesburg, Va., where he had lived alone since losing his wife to cancer four years ago and his children to college. Schwartz had been stabbed to death with a two-foot-long sword, and his killer had carved an X on the back of his neck.
Three friends of Schwartz's college-age daughter were soon arrested for what the prosecutor called a ''planned assassination''; two of the trials for first-degree murder are scheduled for this month. A few weeks later, police arrested the daughter as well. One suspect has a history of mental illness, and their written statements to police talk of devil worship and revenge. There is no talk, however, of microbiology.
On the same day that Schwartz died, Set Van Nguyen, 44, was found dead in an air-locked storage chamber at the Australian Commonwealth's Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's animal diseases facility in Geelong. A months-long internal investigation concluded that a string of equipment failures had allowed nitrogen to build up in the room, causing Nguyen to suffocate. Although the center itself dealt with microbes like mousepox, which is similar to smallpox, Nguyen himself did not. ''Nguyen was in no way involved in research into mousepox,'' says Stephen Prowse, who was the acting director of the Australian lab during the investigation. ''He was a valued member of the laboratory's technical support staff and not a research scientist.''
Word of all these deaths (though not the specific details) found its way to Ian Gurney, a British writer. Gurney is the author of ''The Cassandra Prophecy: Armageddon Approaches,'' a book that uses clues from the Bible to calculate that Judgment Day will occur in or about the year 2023. He is currently researching his second book, which is in part about the threat of nuclear and biological weapons, and after Sept. 11 he entered a news alert request into Yahoo, asking to be notified whenever there was news with the key word ''microbiologist.''
First Que, then Wiley, then Pasechnik, Schwartz and Nguyen popped up on Gurney's computer. ''I'm not a conspiracy theorist,'' says the man who has predicted the end of the world, ''but it certainly did look suspicious.'' Gurney compiled what he had learned from these scattered accounts into an article that
he sent to a number of Web sites, including Rense.com, which tracks U.F.O. sightings worldwide. ''Over the past few weeks,'' Gurney wrote, ''several world-acclaimed scientific researchers specializing in infectious diseases and biological agents such as anthrax, as well as DNA sequencing, have been found dead or have gone missing.''
The article went on to call Benito Que, the cancer lab technician, ''a cell biologist working on infectious diseases like H.I.V.,'' and said that he had been attacked by four men with a baseball bat but did not mention that he suffered from high blood pressure. It then described the disappearance of Wiley without mentioning his seizure disorder and the death of Pasechnik without saying that he had suffered a stroke. It gave the grisly details of Schwartz's murder, but said nothing of the arrests of his daughter's friends. Nguyen, in turn, was described as ''a skilled microbiologist,'' and it was noted that he shared a last name with Kathy Nguyen, the 61-year-old hospital worker who just happened to be the one New Yorker to die of anthrax.
Of course, there have always been rumors based on skewed historical fact. Recall, for example, the list of coincidences that supposedly linked the deaths of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. It goes, in part, like this: The two men were elected 100 years apart; their assassins were born 100 years apart (in fact, 101 years apart); they were both succeeded by men named Johnson; and the two Johnsons were born 100 years apart. Their names each contain seven letters; their successors' names each contain 13 letters; and their assassins' names each contain 15 letters. Lincoln was shot in a theater and his assassin ran to a warehouse, while Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin ran to a theater. Lincoln, or so the story goes, had a secretary named Kennedy who warned him not to go to the theater the night he was killed (for the record, Lincoln's White House secretaries were named John Nicolay and John Hay, and Lincoln regularly rejected warnings not to attend public events out of fear for his safety, including his own inauguration); Kennedy, in turn, had a secretary named Lincoln (true, Evelyn Lincoln) who warned him not to go to Dallas (he, too, was regularly warned not to go places, including San Antonio the day before his trip to Dallas).
I first read about these connections five years after the Kennedy assassination, when I was 8, which says something about how conspiracy theory speaks to the child in all of us. But it also says something about the technology of the time. The numerological coincidences from the World Trade Center that I mentioned at the start of this article made their way onto my computer screen by Sept. 15, from a friend of a friend of a friend of an acquaintance, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
Professor Robins of Harvard points out that ''the Web has changed the scale of these things.'' Had there been a string of dead scientists back in 1992 rather than 2002, he says, it is possible that no one would have ever known. ''Back then, you would not have had the technical ability to gather all these bits and pieces of information, while today you'd be able to pull it off. It's well known that if you take a lot of random noise, you can find chance patterns in it, and the Net makes it easier to collect random noise.''
The Gurney article traveled from one Web site to the next and caught the attention of Paul Sieveking, a co-editor of Fortean Times, a magazine that describes itself as ''the Journal of Strange Phenomena.''
''People send me stuff all the time,'' Sieveking says. ''This was really interesting.'' Wearing his second hat as a columnist for the The Sunday Telegraph in London, he wrote a column on the subject for that paper titled ''Strange but True -- The Deadly Curse of the Bioresearchers.'' His version began with the link between the two Nguyens and concluded, ''It is possible that nothing connects this string of events, but . . . it offers ample fodder for the conspiracy theorist or thriller writer.''
Commenting on the story months later, Sieveking says: ''It's probably just a random clumping, but it just happens to look significant. We're all natural storytellers, and conspiracy theorists are just frustrated novelists. We like to make up a good story out of random facts.''
Over the months, Gurney added names to his list and continued to send it to virtual and actual publications around the U.S. Mainstream newspapers started taking up the story, including an alternative weekly in Memphis, where interest in the Wiley case was particularly strong, and most recently The Toronto Globe and Mail. The tally of ''microbiologists'' is now at 11, give or take, depending on the story you read. In addition to the men already discussed, the names that appear most often are these: Victor Korshunov, a Russian expert in intestinal bacteria, who was bashed over the head near his home in Moscow; Ian Langford, a British expert in environmental risk and disease, who was found dead in his home near Norwich, England, naked from the waist down and wedged under a chair; Tanya Holzmayer, who worked as a microbiologist near San Jose and was shot seven times by a former colleague when she opened the door to a pizza delivery man; David Wynn-Williams, who studied microbes in the Antarctic and was hit by a car while jogging near his home in Cambridge, England; and Steven Mostow, an expert in influenza, who died when the plane he was piloting crashed near Denver.
The stories have also made their way into the e-mail in-boxes of countless microbiologists. Janet Shoemaker, director of public and scientific affairs for the American Society for Microbiology, heard the tales and points out that her organization alone has 41,000 members, meaning that the deaths of 11 worldwide, most of whom were not technically microbiologists at all, is not statistically surprising. ''We're saddened by anyone's death,'' she says. ''But this is just a coincidence. In another political climate I don't think anyone would have noticed.''
Ken Alibek heard them, too, and dismissed them. Alibek is one of the country's best-known microbiologists. He was the No. 2 man at Biopreparrat (where Victor Pasechnik also worked) before he defected and now works with the U.S. government seeking antidotes for the very weapons he developed. Those who have died, he says, did not really know anything about biological weapons, and if there were a conspiracy to kill scientists with such knowledge, he would be dead. ''I considered all this a little artificial, because a number of them couldn't have been considered B.W. experts,'' he says with a hint of disdain. ''I got an e-mail from Pasechnik before he died, and he was working on a field completely different from this. People say to me, 'Ken, you could be a target,' but if you start thinking about this, then your life is over. I'm not saying I'm not worried, but I'm not paying much attention. I'm opening my mail as usual. If I see something suspicious, I know what to do.''
Others are not quite as sanguine. Phyllis Della-Latta is the director of clinical microbiology services at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. She found an article on the deaths circulating in the most erudite place -- an Internet discussion group of directors of clinical microbiology labs around the world. These are the people who, when a patient develops suspicious symptoms, are brought in to rule out things like anthrax.
Della-Latta, whom I know from past medical reporting, forwarded the article to me with a note: ''See attached. FYI. Should I be concerned??? I'm off on a business trip to Italy tomorrow & next week. If I don't return, write my obituary.''
She now says she doesn't really believe there is any connection between the deaths. ''It's probably only coincidence,'' she says, then adds: ''But if we traced back a lot of things that we once dismissed as coincidence -- foreigners taking flying lessons -- we would have found they weren't coincidence at all. You become paranoid. You have to be.''
Don Wiley's body was finally found on Dec. 20, near Vidalia, La., about 300 miles south of where he disappeared.
The Memphis medical examiner, O.C. Smith, concluded that yellow paint marks on Wiley's car suggest that he hit a construction sign on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, as does the fact that a hubcap was missing from the right front tire. Smith's theory is that heavy truck traffic on the bridge can set off wind gusts and create ''roadway bounce,'' which might have been enough to cause Wiley to lose his balance after getting out of the car to inspect the scrapes. He was 6-foot-3, and the bridge railing would have only come up to mid-thigh.
''If Dr. Wiley were on the curb trying to assess damage to his car, all of these factors may have played a role in his going over the rail,'' Smith said when he issued his report. Bone fractures found on the body support this theory. Wiley suffered fractures to his neck and spine, and his chest was crushed, injuries that are consistent with Wiley's hitting a support beam before he landed in the water.
The Wiley family considers this case closed. ''These kinds of theories are something that's always there,'' says Wiley's wife, Katrin Valgeirsdottir, who has heard all the rumors. ''People who want to believe it will believe it, and there's nothing anyone can say.''
The Memphis Police also consider the case closed, and the local office of the F.B.I. has turned its attention to other odd happenings. The talk of Memphis at the moment is the bizarre ambush of the city's coroner last month. He was wrapped in barbed wire and left lying in a stairwell of the medical examiner's building with a live bomb strapped to his chest.
Coincidentally, that coroner, O.C. Smith, was also the coroner who did the much-awaited, somewhat controversial autopsy on Don Wiley.
What are the odds of that?
*
Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer for the magazine.
The whitewashing NY Times neglected that detail.
For more on the story, see here.
Lets think....
Bio reasearch started to go nuts ohh 50/60 odd years ago maybe a little longer,
The adverage age of a newbee bio researcher say 20-25.
so thet put there age at arround 70-85
take into account of all the nasty shit they deal with and...
odds are there dropping like flies.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Was anyone else suspicious of the mention of this movie citation? this FULL citation, which they went WAY out of their way to make, and which mentions the full name of both the actor, the main character he portrays, and the director (with his spooky, stagey name) in addition to the title. It had everything except a hyperlink to Fandango and the Disney web site.
Exactly like the character in a much advertised movie, eh? What a surprising simile.
What are the odds of THAT happening.
So if you're playing craps, and you see someone roll a 12 say, 6 times in a row, do you check to see if the dice are loaded? Or dismiss it as a coincidence? After all, it could happen just once in the history of mankind. Aren't you lucky you got the priveledge of witnessing it?
Call me paranoid, but I'd check the dice.
Probability has nothing to do with the state of the world. It only has to do with the state of our knowledge about the world. If something has a probability of occuring of 0.5 a day or year ( that is an odds of 1) it means there is no evidence to support it either occuring or not occuring. Only evidence can sway the probability in one direction or another. This new evidence does not mean that the world has changed, it just means that we have learned more about the world so we have to adjust our beliefs about it.
... will ..."
I'm sick and tired of journalists making statements like:
- One in ten women will develop breast cancer,
and all the variations of "x in y
If you still think probability has anything to do with the state of the world at all then answer this:
Consider a person who has no information whatsoever about aviation history, what are the odds of a plane crashing in flight according to him?
Now give him all the information -- aviation history. What is now the odds of a plane crashing in flight according to him?
Assuming of course that he is reasoning as logically as we would expect any honest human to.
So you see that probability is just the state of our mind about something based on evidence, and not a projection of the state of the world.
Anybody who fails to see this, is committing what is normally called the "The mind projection fallacy".
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
I am always amazed by the gullibility of the general populice. How can people honestly believe that a modern government could harbour ANY kind of conspiracy given that they can't even keep the affair of a President with an intern secret??
You mean like Iran-Kontra ??? Or Nixon's tapes ??
Yep, the gullibility of the population is amazing ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
It is incumbent upon you as a free-thinking individual to read, understand and evaluate the writings of Congress.
I know a lot of people that break a bunch of silly laws before they get out of bed in the morning. Most of them don't vote because they feel that is implicit support for the government. I can't say they are all that wrong, loss of confidence is a pre-requisite for replacing the current regime. At this point in the States the confidence is low enough, there's just no concensus on what would come in it's place.
It would have to be peaceful too, as it was in the Soviet Union. So the military needs to be convinced and that is much harder since it's a volunteer army so it is even more conservative than a conscript one. And it still doesn't mean you should be unaware of the idiots in congress, since their actions can be used to convince the soldiers. But what's more important is to figure out a better form of government that can unite a good majority of the populace behind it.
Are you kidding? Jeez, talk about "touchy touchy...!"
As an impartial observer who couldn't give a rat's patootie about Operating Systems (Is there any more boring topic in all the world? I mean, for me and 88 ga-billion other people, it's "Does my Word Processor work? Does my Spreadsheet work? Yes? Good! Now get outta here, I got work to do..."), allow me to point out that any slack you perceive MS receiving on this board is purely the product of your over-caffeinated imagination.
The degree to which MS (and Bill Gates personally!) is slammed hereabouts is comical, boarding on Monty Python-esque. That's not to say the quality of the jibes is always worth the price of admission, but the sheer tsunami-level volume is usually good for a chuckle.
I hope for your sake, however, that the success of your Open Source Movement (did I get that right?) does not require many average joe's having to take these juvenile anti-MS tirades seriously, 'cause if so, it's doomed. With very few exceptions, it all looks like High School kids arguing over whose music is better, Britney Spears or MegaDeth.
("Britney Spears or MegaDeth" -- did I get that right?)
"Bigest conspiracy ever , is that conspiracy theories dont exist ." a quote fron www.whatrealllyhappened.com and no its not a
conspiracy site . And we really need to fu#!@#g wake
up and learn from the history.
Michael: My father's no different than any other powerful man. Any man who's responsible for other people, like a Senator, or a President.
Kay: Do you know how naive you sound?
Michael: Why?
Kay: Senators and Presidents don't have men killed.
Michael: Oh. Who's being naive, Kay?
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
between a pro-Linux supporter and a pro-Microsoft supporter on Slashdot? Answer: The former isn't paid to express 'their' ideas.
Well, if you actually read the recount data rather than just the headlines you'd have seen that if all the votes in the state were counted (as the Florida constitution requires), Gore won by a significant number. It was only in selected partial-count scenarios that Bush got more.
And that's not dealing with the issues of Black voters taken off the voter roll, closed polls in Black districts, fraud in military ballots, the use of accurate voting machines in Republican districts and worn out machines in Democratic ones, the questionable legality of having a partisan campaign director running the election, the "bourgeois riot" paid for by the RNC and staffed by Republican Congressional staff halting the recount, the Supreme Court's ruling that isn't allowed to be precedent, the Supreme Court members who under ABA rules should have recused themselves for their family's working for the RNC...
Really, I expect more from Slashdot posters than I do from Limbaugh dittoheads. Apparently I shouldn't.
I would have considered it a proper debunking if it had done a peoper statistical analysis of the deaths -- or something like that. Instead, it simply explained away a couple of the deaths, and hand-waved the others. When the original story went out, I was willing to explain away 3 of the original 11 deaths as 'normal' That still left a cluster of 8 wierd disappearances. This article hand-waved at least one of the deaths that I had already considered 'normal'.
On the pro-cosnpiracy side of this story:
A similar story occured in Vancouver: about 50 or 60 women mysteriously disappeared over the last 10 years in Vancouver. Most of these women were drug users and/or prostitutes. The nature of a prostitute's business is such that a prostitute would be a very juicy target for a serial killer (where else can you consistently get a woman to wander off with a stranger to a remote and secluded area?)
In any case, the Vancouver Police department continued to pooh-pooh complaints of Downtown Eastside residents that these disappearances were unusual. They simply explained it as 'they probably just skipped town'. It wasn't until America's Most Wanted did a story about how Vancouver was a great place to be a serial killer, that they responded at all to the complaints. They still spent a year, or more claiming that it was just a coincidence, despite the fact that a forensic statistician on their own staff found clear evidence of improbability.
It wasn't until last year that some real manpower was put into the investigation, and this year a pig farmer was charged with the murder of a half dozen or more of the missing prostitutes. This summer police hired a bunch of anthropology students to help look for bone fragments and body bits in the dirt pile on his farm.
The moral of the story: Just because something MAY be a coincidence, doesn't mean that it is. If you want to prove, or disprove, a conspiracy around this cluster, you need to look at the whole cluster -- not just point out the easily explainable (or more worrisome) deaths and hand-wave about statistics.
The story at the base of this article neither proves nor disproves the probability of a conspiracy around this cluster of deaths. It simply points out that they're not all unexplainable (something that was clear some time ago).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
And in fact, one of the first things people learn in basic statistics/probability classes is how many striking blind spots the human mind has for math. It's why Vegas works, and its probably part of why we tend to systemmatically misunderstand how "coincidental" things really are (or aren't).
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Apparently you're too clueless to be aware of the crime pulled off by Katherine Harris (Florida Secretary of State, overseer of the state board of elections). Her office directed the company doing voter roll processing to bar ~30,000 eligible voters from exercising their constitutional right to elect their government officials (probably because they would mostly vote Democrat).
There is no direct linkage to this act in the conspiracy to elect Bush. But its obviously an illegal manipulation of the the electoral process in order to elect Republicans, and it probably made the difference in the presidential election.
Finally, the only agency that can pursue a criminal case against Harris is the US Attorney General's office. It's head, John Ashcroft was appointed by the current US President. The federal gov't has chosen to pursue legal action against local election officials, but not Harris.
Still need a clue?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I definitely remembered that Feynman is dead, not reading slashdot.
The NAACP is suing Catherine Harris and Database Technologies over conspiracy to disenfranchise black voters.. Read this article.
The judge thought there was enough evidence to bring her to trial this month
Here are the details.
Repubs are fucked.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
From the article:
"'a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.' In other words, pure happenstance. Yet by merely noticing a coincidence, we elevate it to something that transcends its definition as pure chance. We are discomforted by the idea of a random universe. Like Mel Gibson's character Graham Hess in M. Night Shyamalan's new movie ''Signs,'' we want to feel that our lives are governed by a grand plan."
The definition of coincidence (which starts the quote above) says "no APPARENT connection" (my emphasis). The author is factually incorrect, by their own definition, in saying that "no apparent connection" equals "pure happenstance" (the definition of happenstance is, by the way, "A chance circumstance").
The author then bounces from this shaky springboard into a big leap indeed: the assertion that a person who thinks that something without an "apparent" connection might have a hidden of obfuscated connection is equal to "want(ing) to feel that (their) lives are governed by a grand plan." The rest of the article merely strives to make the reader feel better about this supposed personal weakness.
The article, then, is essentially designed to make the reader feel foolish for considering the possibility of a connection, and in fact suggests that those who consider the possibility of a connection are merely trying to make themselves seem more important to themselves than they are.
This is inappropriate, for a simple reason embodied in the hackneyed phrase "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you". The reason is this: Cause and Effect is a real, everyday occurance. The absence of immediate and irrefutable proof is not cause for dismissal of the possibily of correlation (and potentially causation). If it were, police detectives wouldn't bother investigating crimes -- the lack of immediate and irrefutable proof would be sufficient to rule out guilt.
Instead, I have found (in my own limited life experience) that those who avoid arguments against the allegation, and instead present arguments against he/she making the allegation (as this author is doing), are unable to refute the allegation. Instead, I have found that this inability generally stems from their being:
(a) convinced that they know more than the person with the opposing viewpoint (the closeminded and/or cynical)
(b) lacking sufficient knowledge to refute the allegation, but unable to stay uninvolved (the ignorant and/or nosy) or
(c) aware that the allegation is potentially/partially/completely correct yet is in a position where they must refute the allegation (the guilty and/or the paid off).
Please note that my argument above does not prove that there IS a connection, any more than the article in question proves that there is NOT. My point is simply that the author is either cynical, close-minded, ignorant, nosy, guilty or paid off, and can thusly be safely ignored by intelligent people who are considering the issue for themselves.
yeah I need a clue on if you have any intelligence. instead of spouting partisan crap. you fuckin hack.
never mind about abuse democrats do in elections in chicago. Live in the real world jackass.
Really, I expect more from Slashdot posters than I do from Limbaugh dittoheads.
you mean people who read salon as gospel? sorry im not gonna make a difference between a right wing hack like limnbaugh and left wing hacks like you.
As a vorlon said on B5 once... theres his side , youre side and the truth. so fuck off.
better than to live under lenin, eh comrade?
... people want there to be conspiracy theories so that there's a distinction between "us" and "them". Nobody wants to admit it's "us" doing the bad things - a sinister panel of people in a darkened room is a much more convincing force for bad than "ordinary people".
I'm suprised that the author did not mention Jung's theory of Synchronicity. While the Slashdot crowd may be partial to a mechanistic view of the universe, one may be suprised to find meaningful coincidences occur and ARE NOT SIMPLY CHANCE. You will however, have to experience this yourself to believe me.
As long as you let scientists tell you what to believe you will not have the power to shape your own existence. Are you afraid to know the universe is conscious of you and responds to your thoughts? Synchronicity, or coincidences, then are merely the response of an aware universe to sentient souls which inhabit it. But, alas, you will observe this for yourselves; eventually.
http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/7676/pages ix.html
http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/7676/pages ix.html
You can work the numbers as much as you like for day to day trivalities. No problem because accidents happen. But for real evil, deadly accidents must be planned to appear as coincidences. The CIA had handbooks to capitalize on this benign neglect of political conspiracy and to structure their hits around plausible denial and mere chance. I feel most of the PETWHAC is good for rationalizing the chance of seeing two puppies of the same breed in an the same afternoon. However, for matters with a political nature, research must be done to root out secret teams and planned hits. Groups of people can do evil and can plan it in advance to appear coincidental
Smoke some of this link and get back to us later smarty pants:
g es ix.html
http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/7676/pa
Gurney is the author of ''The Cassandra Prophecy: Armageddon Approaches,'' a book that uses clues from the Bible to calculate that Judgment Day will occur in or about the year 2023.
Isn't that when time_t rolls over? Fixing y2k was hard, but this...damn!
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
That's the SAME combination I have on my luggage!
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Time goes once again to help the CIA cover things up.
There Harvard biologist was certainly killed by the CIA.
There are at least two big secrets about anthrax, that have been revealed in the alternative and foreign press, but the us government is still trying to keep away from the us public.
1. the us stilll develops anthrax and other biological weapons, while bound by treaty not to develop them. That explains why bush refused to sign a treaty that would allow the biological weapons treaty to be better enforced.
2. The anthrax attacks after sep 11 were caused by an american anthrax research scientist. It is not clear whether the bush administration knew about them or ordered them, but it is clear that the bush administration is making no efforts to catch him, and that the targets of the attacks were all enemies of bush.
After people started dying from anthrax in the us, some scientists would surely not stand quetly and watch their copatriots die painful deaths, without telling the public what they know about the sources of anthrax. So they had to be killed.
The stuff about statistics is there to confuse the lay readers. Yeah there are 280 million people in the US. Are there 280 microbiologists in the US. Of course not. There are very few microbiologists in the us and even fewer that are experts on anthrax. Do many microbiologists usually die every year? I dont think so.
"a random clumping" my ass. Even if such a random clumping was possible there is still no explanation why it happened during the anthrax attacks.
I used to live in a communist country and i know a coverup when i see one. And this is a coverup.
Whenever you want to cover something up the first thing you do is paint the people that can't be convinced as crazy conspiracy theorists. And time magazine does it. They also make sure the opposition is not heard from.
For example they say the autopsy of wiley is consistent of the theory that he was blown off the bridge by a wind. that seems very strange and unlikely to me. Yet the much more probably theory that he was pushed off the damn bridge, is not even mentioned.
Microsoft would be STUPID not to do this on slashdot, and I don't think that Microsoft is run by stupid people.
There are two types of people; those who divide people into two types of people, and those who don't.