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Hair in my soup because quantum mechanics.

I don't like hairs in my food. I don't like hairs in my salad. Sam I am, I do not like hairs in my ham. They are, generally, the death of my appetite. Especially if I get a long one stuck in my mouth that I have to pull out as I gag... goodnight everybody!
Anyways, I was talking about this to my grandma one time and, gursh durn Mexicans and their superstitions, she said, "It's because you're so opposed to it that you find it more often..." I thought to myself: freaking Catholics, dude! They have some mumbo jumbo answer for everything.
In the eighteen-something-or-others an experiment was devised known as the double slit experiment. It has been replicated many a times with mirrors and laser beams and whatever. Sparing you the scientific jargon - half of which I don't really get - one of the conclusions they found was that the mere presence of an observer seemed to change the results of the experiment.
To further illustrate this is Schrodinger's famous thingy with a cat. So I have a cat. In a box. There's also poison in this box, that the cat could eat. Until I open the box, the cat is both dead and alive. It is my very "finding out" of this which furthers (not determines, very important) the status of the cat. It may very well be that my butting in kills it. Sidenote: In the back of my head, I can't get over the cruelty of this thought experiment.
So then I thought, just to entertain myself more than anything, what if - what if my grandma was correct? Out of ten people sitting at a table, nine times out of ten that someone finds a hair in their food, I'm the one who gets a hair on his pizza or in his pasta or on the sopes. And what if it is the very fact that I think about it more, that it's more important to me, by which universe aligns itself ever so slightly to "accommodate" that thought?

My question be this:
Has anything(s) ever happened to you that you consider a little too coincidental? That goes against your probabilistic expectations. That makes you doubt your untheist position(s) even for a moment. Has reality ever been stranger than fiction? [Fade out to the X-Files or Stranger Things theme]

FuckReligion 6 Nov 1
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7 comments

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2

Took me a while to wade through the prelude to get to your question, but -- in the process I was reminded -of Adam Felber's novel “Schrödinger’s Ball”. Have you read it? I found it quite entertaining.

Now as to your question: In December 1994 I had a string of coincidences in one afternoon that really made me wonder if some supernatural power was trying to send me a message... and if so... how I could decipher the code to understand its meaning. I can rationalize a part of it, but but other parts just seem so remote from reality that it still amazes me.

At the time, I lived and worked in Seoul, Korea but was back in Oklahoma City on a winter holiday. This was before cell phones and my pager had gone off while I was in the waiting room of a shop where I had taken my daughter's car to get her new tires for Christmas. I used the waiting room phone to call the number from my pager (a coworker in Seoul who was also back home on holiday) and while I talked with her another customer came into the room. Only two of us there, and me on the phone. I'd never seen the man before, had never been in the tire shop before that afternoon.

When I got off the phone, the man wanted to talk but I didn't, and I tried to send him that signal but he kept trying to lure me into a conversation. Finally, when he asked me where I worked, I thought maybe he might not be interested in talking about Korea. I was wrong. He had served in the Army during the Korean War and was eager to talk about Korea. Then he asked what kind of work I did. I explained that I taught at a Korean Foreign Language High School. He then said he had an acquaintance who taught in Seoul as well, and when he explained... it turned out to be the co-worker that I was talking with when he came into the room. I was struck. What caused this stranger who knows my co-worker be in the same tire shop at the same time I was on the phone with her? Such a 'small world' coincidence in a place I'd never been, me on the phone with her, a window of opportunity of only 3 minutes at best, and a man who knows her is the only other person there: what are the odds?

He went on to explain that he happened to know her because they both had undergone knee replacements. To me that was another small world' coincidence. Awareness of the artificial knees
reminded me of 'Don' an Oklahoma City acquaintance that worked for a prosthetic manufacturer. I had last seen Don two years earlier just before I left to start the job in Korea. As I reflected on that I was reminded that Don's name had come up in a conversation with a mutual acquaintance a few months earlier in Seoul. When my car was ready, I left the tire shop and went to a grocery store across the street.
There in the grocery store, I ran into -- you guessed it -- Don. Why? Of all the grocery stores in metro OKC, at any time of day, why would I run into Don on that day after my other bid coincidence? Sheer luck? Was someone/something trying to send me a message? If so, what?

I hope you can understand why it would give me pause to think about it. The full tale is a little more complex, but I've touched on the major points. Two totally unforeseen 'major' coincidences in 20 minutes?

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NO!

2

Clearly you have a problem given oral sex as hairs will occasionally get stuck in your teeth.

In the macro world random unrelated events occur all the time, some times those events are a positive for us, sometimes they are negative and some times they are down right miraculous.

You are chasing an escape cow; see might run right back into the hole she escaped from, sometimes she may take out the neighbours fence and end up in his crop and once in a while she might dodge around you, run up into your yard into an open corral bumping the open gate causing it to rebound and slam behind her. Should I thank the god of cows when the latter happens? Or should I just be happy that the escaping cow ended up locked up so, I could fix the fence?

Our minds tend to remember when randomness goes in our favour more than when it doesn't causing it to be assigned great prominence in our memories so we try ro find meaning to it more than negative outcomes.

3

To answer your question, you live every second of your life, but don't don't remember every one seconds, i can look at my digital clock 100 times in a day without giving it real importance and sometimes i look at it and the time says 1:11 or 1:23, then i say to myself, What a coincidence !!! because i forgot that i look at my clock 99 times before without caring about it, so a coincidence is just something you give importance to, but for another observer, there is no coincidence at all because for him it means nothing

Sometimes you go some place and you meet someone you would not expect to meet, but before meeting this person you probably walk by thousands of strangers that meant nothing to you, but they all got the potential to be coincidence(if you knew them) because you don't know them, it's all about the importance you give to the event.... but thats not all, most human live of the same cycle, we mostly all do the same thing at the same time (when you look at it as a mass)

Anyway, start giving importance to when you don't have hair in your food...
The universe doesn't care about humanity, there's no scheme

I don't like the word ''chance'', because it's a human concept, chance don't really exist, it's a word invented to explain things we can't explain that gives us a sense of uniqueness, it would means the world revolve around you, which so does not !!!

schoringer's cats is just an analogy that means a perfect 50/50 chance, the cat is not really dead and alive at the same time, the cat has a perfect 50/50 chance to be alive or dead, so it's impossible to predict....... but perfect 50/50 don't exist in the human scale, you will always have variable that affect it and bend toward one answer....only at the quantum scale can you observe this

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I can't say I've ever had coincidences that are so far away from normal to have warented starting to believe in some intervention by a higher power.

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I think it might be a case of like when you buy a certain kind of car and then you start to see them everywhere. Or, after you name your child something different you start to hear that name everywhere. Perhaps you are simply taking more notice of hairs, and it bothers you more than it bothers the average person.

Yeah, that's the most practical logic, sure, but what's the fun in that?

4

Have you considered the idea that you might be slowly losing your hair? 😉

My mind? Yes. My hair... a bit.

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