What are the chances???

This past week, NPR has proved that Benson and I were meant for each other. "How?," you may ask? Because in a single week there were stories on national NPR shows that mentioned both of our high schools. Now, we didn't go to Exeter or Stuy, so you likely never heard of our schools before. But that is what makes it so special...

Benson's high school--Mission San Jose High in Fremont, California--was mentioned on Morning Edition on November 29th in the story Immigrants Weigh Splitting from California School System. The story explores how the white students/families at Mission San Jose are annoyed at the majority of Asians (including Indians) at the school--and how some Asians are trying to split away. (There was a follow-up story the next day, Children of Immigrants Seek to Define Their Identity, but that one was a bit more generic and less about the high school itself.)

My high school--Lumberton Senior High in Lumberton, North Carolina--was mentioned later in the week on All Things Considered's Remembering Lance Cpl. Benjamin Bryan. This was a depressing story about a Marine from Lumberton that was killed in Iraq. He also went to Lumberton Senior High, and the school got a brief mention. (The local paper, The Robesonian, covered Bryan's death as well.)

Neither of these stories is particularly happy--one is about tensions with immigrants, and the other is about the death of someone in Iraq. But the coincidence of both of our high schools being mentioned nationally in a single week struck me.

My "What are the chances?" question is a bit tongue-in-cheek. One of my 6.042 (Math for Computer Science) professors, Tom Leighton, did a great job of ruining coincidences for me. His basic point was that if you think of all of the coincidences that could happen that don't then the few that do are statistically insignificant. So when I run into a friend I haven't seen in a long time in a store, what about all of the times that I didn't see that friend in the store? What about all of the other friends that I didn't see in the store? What about all of the other places I didn't see this friend?

Leave it to math to take the fun out of things. But just as I enjoy the slots in Vegas even though I know the mathematical odds are against me, I can be struck by coincidences even though I know they are "statistically insignificant."