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17
Jan
2021
It was Friday January 1, 2021. New Year’s Day. I thought I should start the new year by tackling some old business.
For the last 20 years, Joan stored her growing collection of murder mysteries in our spare bedroom. One set of books caught my eye – by P.D. James, the undisputed queen of British murder mystery writers. A publisher’s promo calls her the author of 11 books, but I counted 20.
Including her one foray into science fiction, The Children of Men, published in 1992.
I had never read it before. I opened the book. On Friday the first of January, 2021, the opening words were, “Friday 1 January 2021.”
What were the odds, I wondered, that Ms James would have chosen to start a book published 28 years ago with the very date on which I would open that book?
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: probability, P.D. James, coincidence
11
Sep
2017
Joan and I were sitting in our hot tub last Monday night, staring up at the stars and wondering when -- if ever -- the rains would return to the B.C. interior, that day being our 66th without perceptible rainfall, when a brilliant flash lit up the eastern sky.
“Lightning?” Joan wondered. “The weather isn’t supposed to change until the weekend.”
I started counting for the boom of thunder. Years ago, I learned that sound travels at roughly a thousand feet per second. If the boom follows the flash by five seconds, the centre of action is safely about a mile distant. (For a kilometre, about three seconds – a little closer.)
I quit counting after ten. Joan claims she heard a rumble, about ten minutes later.
Which would be about right. Because the flash, we learned the next morning, had occurred more than 200 km away, directly over Kootenay Lake. A hunk of rock left over from the formation of our solar system had smashed into the earth’s atmosphere over the little town of Boswell at the south end of Kootenay Lake; it blew up over Meadow Creek, slightly beyond the lake’s north end.
Tags: chance, judgement, Meteoroid, meteorite, bolide, fireball, Kootenay Lake, dinosaurs, probability