(I was going to add this as post in the ‘Fortean dates of birth’ thread, but as it’s off at a bit of a tangent, and I’ve never started a thread of my own on this board, I thought I’d give it a go!)
A while back I posted what I thought was an amusing and instructive little anecdote on another site; basically I related how a friend had downloaded an astrology program and produced astrological profiles for myself and a group of friends. After several people had studied theirs and remarked on how accurate and uncanny they were, she realised that the program had been using the American date format, ie, Month/day/year and she had put peoples month of birth instead of day, so everyone had got the wrong profile, but everyone had thought that it fitted them anyway. Tee hee and yah boo to pop astrology.
I didn’t think any deeper into it until I got a rather hostile response from some guy who virtually called me a liar, saying that for this to have happened, everyone involved would have to have been born in the first 12 days of the month. I checked this out and it was true, all our birthdays fell before the 12th of the respective month. When I confirmed this, he was very sceptical, claiming that the odds against this happening were, er, astronomical.
Now, despite having been put through a year of statistics as part of my degree, I’m not too hot on probability; can any one help work out what the odds are? (Maybe in my original post I created the impression that more people were actually involved, we are talking about 8 individuals.)
If the odds are stacked against this, have I discovered a new phenomena? Does being born in the early part of the month skew you towards an interest in Forteana??
Ideas and comments please!
A while back I posted what I thought was an amusing and instructive little anecdote on another site; basically I related how a friend had downloaded an astrology program and produced astrological profiles for myself and a group of friends. After several people had studied theirs and remarked on how accurate and uncanny they were, she realised that the program had been using the American date format, ie, Month/day/year and she had put peoples month of birth instead of day, so everyone had got the wrong profile, but everyone had thought that it fitted them anyway. Tee hee and yah boo to pop astrology.
I didn’t think any deeper into it until I got a rather hostile response from some guy who virtually called me a liar, saying that for this to have happened, everyone involved would have to have been born in the first 12 days of the month. I checked this out and it was true, all our birthdays fell before the 12th of the respective month. When I confirmed this, he was very sceptical, claiming that the odds against this happening were, er, astronomical.
Now, despite having been put through a year of statistics as part of my degree, I’m not too hot on probability; can any one help work out what the odds are? (Maybe in my original post I created the impression that more people were actually involved, we are talking about 8 individuals.)
If the odds are stacked against this, have I discovered a new phenomena? Does being born in the early part of the month skew you towards an interest in Forteana??
Ideas and comments please!
