Quite cool! Reminded me of a video taken from an old TV show where they had an archeologist against one of those pyramidiots (real word) whose favourite pastime is ‘discovering’ that sort of spurious coincidences and writing books about it. The archeologist made the same argument you did, that if you’re trying to find any two things that match among a set of a million things, you’ll find a lot of matches. Or, as he put it “you can find anything if you’re just looking for anything you fancy”. He handled it rather well: before going into the studio, he had taken the measurements of a hot-dog stand or something, and then spend his time on the show going “see, if you add the length of the counter where the hot dogs are, plus twice the width of the roof, multiply by a billion, that’s the distance between the Earth and the Moon! And if you…”
Quite cool! Reminded me of a video taken from an old TV show where they had an archeologist against one of those pyramidiots (real word) whose favourite pastime is ‘discovering’ that sort of spurious coincidences and writing books about it. The archeologist made the same argument you did, that if you’re trying to find any two things that match among a set of a million things, you’ll find a lot of matches. Or, as he put it “you can find anything if you’re just looking for anything you fancy”. He handled it rather well: before going into the studio, he had taken the measurements of a hot-dog stand or something, and then spend his time on the show going “see, if you add the length of the counter where the hot dogs are, plus twice the width of the roof, multiply by a billion, that’s the distance between the Earth and the Moon! And if you…”
That was glorious. The link’s here (in French).