Interesting Links for 14-03-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Work to begin immediately on £55m music centre vision for Edinburgh landmark (the old Royal High School on Calton Hill)

(tags:music school edinburgh )

2. Gary Lineker row: All the people employed or used in BBC programming who are outspoken on social media

(tags:bbc twitter socialnetworking )

3. The care worker recruitment crisis is even bigger than the NHS

(tags:jobs Doom care )

4. Why did 250,000 Britons die sooner than expected? (Austerity)

(tags:uk austerity death )

5. Silicon Valley Bank seem to have managed risk unusually badly

(tags:risk banking Technology epicfail )

6. Nabokov was not a fan of many people's interpretation of Lolita

(tags:abuse children rape writing )

7. Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The Thing'

(tags:scifi funny music musicals )

8. The Pithiest Critique of Modern Conservatism Keeps Getting Credited to the Wrong Man

(tags:Conservatives politics mistakes )

9. Trams! Invade Leith!

(tags:Edinburgh trams video transport )

10. What's Going On With Red Dwarf?

(tags:RedDwarf TV scifi )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I think it will be like the chances of two people sharing a birthday. More common than you might at first think. Butless common than sharing a birthday because there are more names than days in the year.

Chances of two random people sharing a birthday are 1 in 365.

If you assume there are a thousand different family names and a thousand different given names then there are million combinations of Given Name Family Name. So the chance of two people sharing a name are 1 in a million.

It's clearly more complicated than that for names as there are more than 1,000 Given or Family Names, people have different numbers of Given Names and some cultures and languages have quite different naming conventions and structures from other cultures.

Your chances of finding two people in the United States called John Smith who share an amusing name related coincidence is probaby higher than finding two people with the same name in Pitjantjatjara (number of estimated speakers circa 3,000).

[nancylebov]

It's more of a coincidence because the wrong guy is the more plausible source of the quote.

[danieldwilliam]

Aye - you'd need to factor in some additional category of amusingness or strikingness of coincidence.