Beating The Odds
Big deal, we did this a long time ago!
A husband, wife and their first child beat enormous odds and share the same birthday. Evelin Alballat was introduced to Tony Osman several years ago by one of her relatives who learned they were both born on May 21. The couple married two years ago.
Their baby's due date was May 20 and Alballat started having contractions around 10 p.m. that night. She was then admitted to Marian Medical Center.
"I kept staring at the clock and wanted it to turn past midnight before I delivered my baby," she said.
Danny Osman entered the world about 12 hours later.
….
The chances of three family members sharing a birthday are .000751 percent, according to Paul Murphy, a mathematician and dean of academic affairs at Allan Hancock College.
Well, let's see: My brother's birthday is November 23. My oldest son was also born on November 23, making him my brother's automatic favorite nephew. Then my wife's birthday is also November 23rd - making her my brother automatic favorite sister-in-law. It doesn't take much to keep my brother amused.
Weird Stuff | Gaius Wednesday, 24 May , 2006
By BubbaB, Wednesday, 24 May , 2006 @ 10:41 am
See, now, here is my problem with mathematicians being so willing to throw out probabilities. In this situation, they don’t mean much.
The probability of two people “randomly” getting married, and then discovering they had the same birthday, and then having a child on the same day - well, that might mean something.
The problem is, these two people didn’t “randomly” get married. They knew each other, and I am sure at some point both of them thought, “We have the same birthday! It’s fate!!” In common terms, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy (in technical terms, it’s called bias, and is the reason that the best studies are “double-blind” studies.) That ruins the argument about any “probability” of those two people being married and having the same birthday.
SIGH!! Everybody should be required to take a statistics course in high school.
I think the “probability” is more accurate in your case, Gaius.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 24 May , 2006 @ 10:53 am
Yeah, none of that was planned. Unless my brother’s been plotting. Again.