SusoSight SusoSight

If the world is a computer simulation, I'd like to report a bug in the random number generator.

Synchronicity is where a series of events happen in a meaningful matter. You can read more about what it is on Wikipedia. I'm sure we've all had some of those moments. I have a suprising number of them. Sometimes multiple per day or for multiple days in a row. They have become so common in my life that over the last decade I've recorded many of the major ones and some of the minor ones. 2006 had a high concentration of them that had witnesses to some of them. What does it mean? Well, I think all it means is that I've confirmed that I'm an observant person.

I'm also working on A scale for measuring Synchronicity. I also have a log of other people's moments of Synchronicity.

The problem with the log below is that I haven't recorded many of the minor moments of synchronicity, which I would need to do to be really scientific about it.

2023

• December 2nd
  • 3:38pm** - I was sitting at the kitchen table and pulled up Youtube and clicked on one of the recommended videos, which was of a USPS postal truck rear ending a parked car. In the video, the postal worker starts walking up to the house and right as that happens my own door bell rang. I went to the door and it was my local postal worker delivering a package that needed a signature.
    • [Score timing: 10, role: 4, rarity: 9, frequency: 2.5 = 6.375]

2022

• September 28th
  • 10pm** - Earlier in the day at a meeting we were talking about large telescopes and their cybersecurity programs. After hearing about the Giant Magellan Telescope, I went to wikipedia on my work computer using my work profile browser and found the GMT along with a list of other telescopes on this page. On that page the SOFIA telescope caught my eye and I read a bit about it as I had never heard of it before. Later that night on my home computer and personal browser profile (no shared cookies or accounts between the two) at 10pm I was looking at Youtube and one of the top suggested videos was one that was just released today on the SOFIA telescope talking about how you've probably never heard of it before. It's likely on any given day that I would hear about telescopes and see an astronomy video suggested, so that pushes the frequency down a lot in this case.
    • [Score timing: 3.5, role: 5, rarity: 8.5, frequency: 3 = 5.0]

• April 7-8th
  • April 7th - I was looking up dates in the climagic calendar and checked when the Unix Epoch day 20000 takes place, which will be October 4th, 2024. Later that day, my wife and daughter were talking about Oxford and my wife noted that their school session starts on October 4th without me mentioning anything.
  • April 8th - In the morning I went to the store, on the way back I was listening to Satellite radio and "What's the Frequency Kenneth" by R.E.M. was playing. I've heard the song, but I didn't know the lyrics or the title really so I looked it up and discovered the story of Dan Rather being attacked and that it was on October 4th, 1986. Then I remembered that there was some date that CNN wrote some dumb article in 2013 about many things happening on a specific date and thought it might have been October 4th, but it was on October 3rd. [Score timing: 3, role: 6, rarity: 8, frequency: Kenneth? Maybe a 3 = 5.0]
• January 19th-21st
  • January 19th, 7:57am - I was looking at people born on September 27th and noticed that Meat Loaf was one of them and clicked on his article. I don't think I've ever looked at his article. But of course I look at various articles on people on Wikipedia often.
  • January 20th, evening - Meat Loaf died, a few days after contracting COVID-19.
  • January 21st, morning - I saw a notice on Twitter that Meat Loaf was trending.
    • [Score timing: 3, role: 7, rarity: 9, frequency: 2 = 5.25]

2021

• July 7th
• 5:37pm - I clicked on This VCV tutorial and right as the narrator said "Mostly aimed at beginners", the person sitting next to me said "right when he said beginners I was typing in beginners" [Score timing: 10, role 5, rarity: 7, frequency: 2 = 6.0]

• March 7th

IMDB ad

• • 11:11am - I was listening to the Pat Metheny Group's The Falcon and the Snowman soundtrack album and heard in track 08 a sample of a man saying "This is not America". Not the David Bowie track but perhaps something from the movie. So I went to imdb.com to see information about the movie and check if it's a listed quote and I'm greeted on the front page of imdb.com with a new movie advertisement for "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier". As far as I know, the movies have nothing to do with each other, but it's such a unique coincidence given the rare names of these things. Winter soldier and Snowman seem like nearly the same thing. I also can't help but notice the common not-American theme between this synchronous moment and the previous one recorded here in November, 2020. [ Score timing: 9, role 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 3 = 6.75 ]

2020

• November 15th
  • 8:32am - I was writing up this post on Twitter about how our postal system's motto can be attributed to Herodotus and right when I posted it, Meagan Eller tweet quoted What is something that isn’t American, but feels American?. [ Score timing: 9, role 6, rarity: 8, frequency: 2 = 6.0]

2019

• December 21st
  • 1:31pm - Facebook did one of those "here's an old post from this date thing" on this post, which I probably get about once a week. I went to look at it and noticed that Michelle K. had made a comment "Everything is connected" back in 2016. 5 seconds later after reading that Michelle sent me a direct message on for the first time since 2013 (according to Facebook chat logs), letting me know about a new production of a Philip Glass opera. Strangely enough, this is the 2nd time this photo has been in this synchronicity log. The previous time was in 2016 when I made that Facebook post and made a note of it here. That wasn't a synchronous moment, it was just something I recorded because of the connection and it only received a score of 3.5. [ Score: timing; 10, role: 7, rarity: 8, frequency: 3 = 7.0]

2018

• January 15th
  • 6am - Private log entry, [Score: timing: 8, role: 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 3 = 6.5]

2017

• September 22nd
  • 1:45pm - Today we had a brown bag at CACR about the IU Policy office. I brought up Ian Rogers as one of the early people at IU to stream music on campus back in 1993 because he was interviewed in a documentary called Downloaded that I had watched before (Turns out I watched it on 2015-09-24 according to a Facebook post I made). I must have followed Ian on twitter or something after that, I don't remember. Today after the brown bag back at my desk I looked my phone notifications and twitter notified me "Ian C. Rogers tweeted after a while". The tweet in question was from the 21st but I hadn't seen it until Twitter notified me after the brown bag. Apparently it was the first he had tweeted since September 8th, 2017. I immediately showed this to Randy because just yesterday I was telling him about my Synchronous moments and this blew his mind. Another interesting thing came up today, it was the second time I've been at work that someone had tried to figure out the song Sundown by Gordon Lightfoot. The previous time was years ago at Cook. UPDATE: On Oct 18th I received another notification for Ian Rogers tweeting after a while, so once a month perhaps? (Score not updated for now) [Score: timing: 7, role: 4, rarity: 8, frequency: 3 = 5.5]

• April 3rd
  • On April 2nd I was talking to my dad about how scientists are doing research on how when you spin fluids at high speeds they make geometric shapes in an attempt to understand how things like the hexagon on Saturn are formed. Can't remember why I brought this up at the moment, but it was the first time I had thought about it in years since I first read about it and maybe the first time I ever talked about it. I just remember reading about it. On April 3rd, The Astronomy Picture of the Day is about the hexagon pattern at the pole on Saturn. [Score: timing: 3, role: 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 8 = 6.5]
• March 22nd
  • 

    Picture of the poplar tree that was struck by lightning
    Sometime in early March (March 10th or before) I added a line to my climagic queue file that said "Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!". I think it was probably after a thunderstorm. I put it in there just to be funny and thought that I'd use it later at some point when it made sense. On the morning of March 22nd, lightning struck a tree next to my parent's house and the tree exploded with enough force to eject a piece of wood into the side of their house and through 3 walls (siding, ceiling and closet frame). Looking back, I couldn't remember if I had added that line after the tree exploded, but now when I check my backups of the queue file, I see that it went back before it happened.
    .../incrementals]# grep "BOOM" */eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt
    

20170314080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170315080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170317080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170318080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170321080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170322080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170323080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170324080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170325080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170329080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all mine says is BOOM!!
20170330080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all I hear it say is BOOM!!
20170331080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all I hear it say is BOOM!!
20170402080001/eno/home/suso/climagic-queue.txt:----Lightning talks, but all I hear it say is BOOM!!
I decided to finally go ahead and post the quote along with the picture because well why not. Another interesting tid bit about this, the damage caused to the house will be covered by insurance, but there is a $500 deductible. Two months prior to all this my dad won $500 from the lottery 2 months ago after getting 4 out of 6 numbers right and gave me the money as a birthday present. I gave it back. ;-) [Score: timing 1, role: 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 4 = 5.0]

• February 12th
  • 8:40am - Eric was watching The Cat in the Hat episode about "Let's play when I grow up" meanwhile I was reading Learning Javascript p. 157, the section on Polymorphism. In the Cat in the Hat They meet a duckbill platypus to see what it will look like and the Cat says "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck." Just as he said that I read the sentence "Very often in JavaScript, the code you write employs some form of duck typing. This technique comes from the expression “if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...it’s probably a duck.”" [Score: timing: 9, role: 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 3 = 6.75]
• February 4th
  • 8:15am - On the 3rd in the afternoon I was reading about ancient Egypt in a history book. I kept asking my Amazon Echo for the definition of cuneiform and it kept thinking I was saying Uniform. I also asked it for the definition of Papaya, but I had to look it up on the computer anyways to see a picture. Today at 8:15am I'm going through an example in another book I'm reading Learning Javascript and come across the following array on page 142 (heh): const words = ["Beachball", "Rodeo", "Angel","Aardvark", "Xylophone", "November", "Chocolate","Papaya", "Uniform", "Joker", "Clover", "Bali"]; the words Papaya and Uniform are right next to each other in the array. Papaya is a fairly obscure word and honestly I think this is the first time I've seen it in a computer book. Although I knew before what Papaya was, this may be the first time I've actually looked it up. I could have read this part of the Javascript book yesterday, but didn't. So here is a case where the timing could have been as high as 7. I've recently been reading these books on a daily basis although I've had the history book on my shelf for 15+ years. [Score: timing: 3, role: 4, rarity: 9, frequency: 3 = 4.75]
• February 3rd
  • 6:15pm - In the morning of the 3rd at breakfast, Adela had asked me about Bowling Green, KY because in music they are singing a song about it or something. Later that day, news came out about how Trump Advisor Kellyanne Conway said Bowling Green Massacre by mistake in an interview. I found out about this through a friend's Facebook post around 6:15pm on the 3rd. Its been probably years since I've heard or thought about Bowling Green. [Score: timing: 3, role: 8, rarity: 9, frequency: 3 = 5.75 ]

2016

• December 20th
  • 8pm - This is a coincidence, not a synchronicity event. I was sitting at home with my son watching Super Mario videos on youtube. Something we do too often actually. I choose to watch this video, which is the Super Mario World Castle Theme played on a real organ. Interested in hearing more, I started checking out that user's other videos, which mostly were in Russian, which was interesting. Then I encounter this video in his list titled "Tornado warning in Bloomington IN/Предупреждение о торнадо". Surprised that its for Bloomington, Indiana, I started watching. The video is interesting to watch because he struggles through a tornado producing storm and braves his way through hail even. At the end of the video I saw the sunset and realized that it might be the same storm where I took this photo from the skywalk at the Fountain Square Mall. Turns out it was the same storm. Even though this is just a coincidence, I'm going to score it to show that a coincidence is not quite the same thing and the closest way they relate is in their rarity, which makes sense. [Score: timing: 1, role: 3, rarity: 8, frequency: 2 = 3.5]

• December 13th
  • 10pm - On December 13th Alan Thicke, one of the stars of the 1980s/90s sitcom Growing Pains died. The crazy part is that just the day before (December 12th at 9:27am according to my browser history) I was reading an article about ransomware that was posted on SANS ISC. On the article page there was a set of advertisements, one of which showed a picture of Ben Seaver from the show (actor Jeremy Miller) with a caption of something like "You won't believe which Growing Pains Actor died". I was curious but didn't feel like clicking on [1] the link to the clickbait ad] so I quickly checked Wikipedia for the common actors and couldn't find one. I clicked on the clickbait ad and saw that they weren't going to tell me right away and figured it was the guy who played Boner or something. Anyways, I didn't think much more about it until I checked Twitter around 10pm and saw that Alan Thicke was trending. Unfortunately I can't find the original ad now and the clickbait site isn't on archive.org so it may go away. The article claims it was written on December 4th, 6th and 9th by at least two different authors, so it could just be randomizing the data. The scoring on this one doesn't feel right, but I'll stick to the scale. [Score: timing: 3, role: 8, rarity: 8, frequency: 2 = 5.25]

• September 17th
  • 4:51pm - While driving out in the country I came upon an old house on a grassy field. But this wasn't just any house, the house was an old log cabin without any modern amenities such as indoor plumbing, electricity or a two car garage. I stopped to take a picture of the house and just then looked in my rearview mirror saw a 90 year old Ford Model A driving up the road. For a brief moment, I felt like I had travelled back 100 years. After passing the car at the stop sign at the end of the road, I travelled up SR43 a bit and pulled off to see if I could get a picture of the Model A driving by, which I did. The model A seemed to be just driving around, but could be from that same road. I don't remember ever driving up that road. [Score: timing: 9, role: 7, rarity: 9, frequency: 4 = 7.25 ]

• September 12th
  • 5pm - This happened while on a trip to Austin, TX to attend BroCon 2016 (Network security monitor). After arriving at the airport, I went to seek ground transportation to the hotel and decided to take a SuperShuttle, which is like a group taxi. I got into the SuperShuttle Van and thought that the guy in front of me looked a bit familiar. While on the way to the hotel, I decided to check Twitter for people talking about BroCon and searched for #BroCon2016. I found this conversation between climagic follower @jamesbower and @JustinAzoff. I then realized that I had seen Justin Azoff before and then realized that he may be the person sitting in front of me in the van. When we finally stopped at the same hotel, I asked him and he confirmed who he was. I realize that several people going to the conference would be arriving at the same time, but still interesting that I was reading his conversation while sitting behind him. [Score: timing: 6, role: 7, rarity: 7, frequency: 7 = 6.75 ]

• May 3rd night-time - I was searching Youtube for videos on how to build steps on a slopped incline and found this video which had nothing to do with that, but off of that video in the suggested column I noticed this video about the Monroe Lake Spillway Flooding in 2011. I clicked on that and the video was filmed by Monroe County Surveyor Kevin Enright. The video only had about 1400 views (although according to stat graphics it jumped up by 500 in the days prior to viewing it). On May 5th I visited the Herald Times website and on the front page is the article that Kevin Enright had passed away after having an aneurysm on the night of May 3rd and died the next day. I can't find any evidence of why the Monroe Spillway video had a jump in views, but the timing was interesting. I rarely look for Lake Monroe videos and the only way I know Kevin Enright is from his 2004 run for Surveyor interview on WFHB where his opposition claimed that Kevin had no experience in surveying and just wanted a political office. The two events here is Kevin's unfortunate aneurysm and my viewing of the video. I'm putting the frequency at 7 (annually) because my interest had to do with working on something outside in the summer. [Score: timing: 6, role: 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 7 = 7.0 ]

• April 18th
  • 3pm - I had just created and started working on the asset template for the @TrustedCI twitter account. A few minutes later I went over to my @climagic twitter account to check things for today and one of the 3 recommended users was the @TrustedCI twitter account. Its worth noting that these are two separate browser profiles with different cookie databases. [Score: timing: 8, role: 7, rarity: 7, frequency: 5 = 6.75 ]

• April 14th
  • ~10pm - In Madison, WI I stayed on the 12th and 13th at the Hotel Red and had room 319. We then traveled to Chicago where I stayed in the Holiday Inn Downtown and also got room 319. I think both hotels had 4 or 5 floors, but the Holiday Inn probably had twice as many rooms. This actually isn't the first time I've had the same room number at a hotel. One time I had the same room at the same hotel on consecutive visits. [Score: timing: 5, role: 8, rarity: 6, frequency: 6 = 6.25 ]

2015

• August 15th
  • 3:13:33pm - climagic passes 100,000 followers. on the exact date that those license plates counted down to starting April 13th, 2010. Difficult to score based on the scoring method used so far.

• August 14th/15th
  • So although this date hasn't happened yet, its interesting because I remember this date as the one that the license plates counted down to the week of April 13th, 2010 as detailed on this page. I happen to be travelling by plane on the 16th for a work event I had no role in planning and this is also the approximate week when @climagic will pass 100,000 followers according to estimations. :-/

• August 7th
  • 1am - This one has multiple times. From my perspective it was like this. At 12:25am EST on the 7th I was trying to fix a problem with an IMAP server and StartTLS and came across a blog post where he said in honor of this XKCD comic, I'm sharing this information to help others. Then around 4pm today my boss posted a link to a twitter update by Kenn White at 8pm August 6th EST where he also referred to that comic in relation to his dd-wrt woes, which was a different unrelated problem. Turns out Kenn is also a @climagic follower. I'll make event A his update and event B my blog post encounter. Its not the first time I've seen references to that comic. Maybe once a year. It felt significant enough to talk about it here. [score: timing: 4.5, role: 6, rarity: 7, frequency: 2.5 = 5.0]

• July
  • Between July 6th and the 17th I was on vacation in Hilton Head Island, SC at a resort. While at this hotel there were 3 times when I was in the presence of another person named Mark (My name too) and someone else called their name. This happens probably twice a year to everyone. The high concentration of it happening was interesting, however when you consider that Mark was one of the more popular names given to 1970s babies and we were at a hotel full of middle class parents in their late 30s and 40s with their kids, it probably wasn't that surprising. One time I was walking up the hall and right at the moment I passed between one guy named Mark and another one calling his name. Let's analyze that event. Time is instantaneous. Potential frequency is hard to determine. It would basically be a measurement of the number of times you stand within 15 feet of someone with your name. That depends on the popularity of your name I guess. So for mine I'll say it was potentially daily. Maybe once a day. For my daughter named Adela, that potentially frequency would be rated very high because there are so few with that name. The role is interesting. Neither I nor the other Mark called out the name, it was a friend of the person. So we could rate that one fairly high.

[score: timing: 10, role: 8, rarity: 6, frequency: 2 = 6.5]

-- Several other minor/semi major ones in here, just didn't have time to record them. It has felt like they have been happening more frequently in the past month. --

• March 14th
  • 12:55pm - Daughter was just sitting in the living room I was in another room cleaning. I had to respond back to an e-mail for Craigslist and I thought in my head "Same bat time, Same bat place" (like in the TV show). Just a minute later I hear her singing to herself "Nananananana Batman!". The weird thing is, we almost never talk about Batman and I didn't think she even knew about it. She said her friend told her about it. [score: timing: 9, role: 6, rarity: 8, frequency: 5 = 7.0]
• 'February 14th
  • 11pm - I was watching the S1E15 of the documentary Ancient Aliens, which was about obelisks. One of the first ones that they talked about was the Washington Monument. Later I checked Facebook and a family friend who was visiting Washington D.C. posted a picture of the Washington monument at 10:49pm. I'd estimate that the Washington Monument comes up in conversation or on Facebook maybe 4 times a year from my point of view. I watch TV maybe once or twice a week, although its not always documentaries, but it could have been any TV show I guess. [score: timing: 8, role: 5, rarity: 6, frequency: 3 = 5.5]

2014

Taking care of a new baby is very time consuming.

2013

• August 13th
  • 2:15pm - My friend Stephen had posted a link a few days before to this page on Communist Safety posters just now I was checking the thread because someone commented, Stephen had labeled it "In Soviet Russia, machine mangles you" and I thought of going to Slashdot because they used to like to make Soviet Russia jokes over there and right at that moment the upcoming story that I'm greeted with is Russia Today: Vladimir Putin's Weapon In 'The War of Images'. In Soviet Russia, synchronicity observes you. [score: timing: 9, role: 6, rarity: 7, frequency: 2 = 6.0]
• July 21st
  • ~11am - In the morning my daughter was watching some show where they talked about space and lasers and it made me think about the episode of Star Trek TNG called Homesoil where Data has to avoid getting hit by a laser. Just 30 minutes later we were having lunch and my wife said something about humans being mostly water and said giant bags of mostly water, referring to the part of that same episode where the sand crystals talk to the humans.[score: timing: 7, role: 8, rarity: 6, frequency: 2 = 5.75]
  • 2:44pm - While at my daughter's friend's birthday party with my wife there, I receive a call from my mom, whom I ask to call back later. 30 seconds after I hang up, my wife's mom (who was returning from a trip) calls her. [score: timing: 9, role: 7, rarity: 8, frequency: 2 = 6.5]
  • ~3pm - In the morning after thinking about that scene of Homesoil with the laser I also thought about the epsidoe Imaginary Friend. I was at my daughter's friend's birthday party later that day and the adults where engaged in conversation and they started talking about imaginary friends and one of the people's relatives was the world's expert on the subject. [score: timing: 7, role: 8, rarity: 6, frequency: 2 = 5.75]
  • - that night - Not sure when she bought it. My wife asked me on Saturday (July 20th) when I went to the bookstore to buy a cookbook. So I ended up buying a book called "365 dish a day" [2] because I thought it would make it easier to come up with ideas for what to eat that day, you could just look up the date. My wife's mom had just returned from her trip and brought back several items, one of them was a Russian cook book called 365 dishes, one for each day. All Russian cuisine. [score: timing: 3, role: 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 7 = 6.25]

The Dual Meteor Event

• February 15th - - Dual meteors. Not related to me, but this was a world observed synchronous event of note, so it should be recorded and scored. Especially given its rarity and the significant damage caused by the Chelyabinsk meteor. In the weeks prior to Feb. 15th, the media and social networking were abuzz with the fear that a meteor called 2012_DA14 would pass close enough to Earth and may explode in the air and cause significant damage to a city. About 16 hours prior to the closest approach of 2012_DA14, the Chelyabinsk meteor entered the atmosphere over Russia and exploded, causing a lot of damage. It was also the most widely recorded meteor in human history, having been captured by dozens of car dashboard cameras. This event presents an interesting dilemma in measuring its Synchronicity score. Should the score be only measured from the point of view of the human observer(s) and thus the timing, frequency and rarity are based on normal timing human scales. Or should the event be from an astronomical point of view, in which the timing in this case would be nearly instantaneous, but thus the frequency and rarity have to also account for this change in the timing scale. I think that traditionally synchronicity has to do with the observances of sentient beings, so I'll keep this on the human scale, however, I will skew the timing up a bit (would be 3, but will make it 5) because it was something that was predicted months ahead of time. [score based on human observer: timing: 5, role: 10, rarity: 10, frequency: 9 = 8.5]

[score based on astronomic observer: timing: 10, role: 5, rarity: 5, frequency: 2 = 5.5]

• February 1st - 9am - So the XKCD for today was a joke about trying to type in a valid tar command in 10 seconds or the bomb will explode. http://xkcd.com/1168/ This is easy and so I posted a joke about it on climagic followed by an option mnemonic joke that I've posted before. Turns out that the last time I posted that option mnemonic thing to climagic was February 1st, 2012. Time in this case has a different meaning that how close things are together. I have no control over XKCD so its interesting that his comic was as it was today, triggering my posts. [score: timing: 8, role: 6, rarity: 7, frequency: 3 = 6.0]
• January 5th - 10:11am - Daughter wanted me to read the episode titles of Bill Nye the Science Guy. Which I haven't done for her before. She picked up something behind me off the table and when I got the episode "Eyeball" she showed me what she had in her hand, which was a big googly eye sticker. [score: timing: 9, role: 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 6 = 7.5]
• January 1st - 10:30pm - Daughter is up late wanting to stay up until midnight because she missed it on NYE. So she is in the room with me working on learning Russian with Mommy. I'm working on something in Blender and specifically working on curves for keyframes. Then they say, Daddy we're doing the same thing. I had just made a "sine wave" for a bunch of keyframes and they show me their Russian Book where she just had to do some exercise where she had to draw a wavy "sine wave" type shape over and over. I'm not often in the curve editor and this is the first time she has worked with these books. [score: timing: 8, role: 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 6 = 7.25]

• 

  Blender curves

• 

  Russian book "curves"

2012

• December 31st - ~9:30 or so - I was listening to the HPR NYE hangout while doing some stuff in Blender. Suddenly I noticed that I had hit a wrong key and turned on snap mode in Blender, which I've probably used less times than I have fingers to count. The icon for snap mode is a magnet and I noticed that as I did that that someone on the HPR show was talking about Magnet Links in BitTorrent. I didn't really talk much at all during the HPR hangout so I can't be viewed as having an influence on the topic. [score: timing: 9, role: 7, rarity: 9, frequency: 7 = 8.0]

• December 30th - 10:40am - I was programming and my daughter was sitting on the couch using her Leapad. I was in a man page for tmux and right when I searched for the word size in the page her Leapad said "You can size, etc.". She doesn't use her leapad that often anymore and I've probably only searched for size in the tmux man page a few times before. [score: timing: 10, role: 6, rarity: 6, frequency: 3 = 6.25]
• Oct 31st - morning - This morning brimston3 on IRC posted a link to olduse.net, which is a site for reliving old usenet in real time. Never have been to it before. So as I looked through the articles from 30 years ago, I looked for Tron reviews since 1982 was the year Tron came out and that was the year they are posting to at the time. Among them I found this interesting post, which gives good evidence that the origin of the name Tron may have come from the PDP-10 assembly language mnemonic which means 666. So I went to my Tron article and added this information and looked down to the bottom of the page to see how many hits the article has received and the hit counter was at 665. I haven't been to that Tron article on my site for nearly 2 years (and certainly didn't generate all those hits), so it was a pretty rare combination, especially since the content I got from the article was something specific like the number 666. You may also consider it interesting that all this happened on Halloween. [score: timing: 8, role: 7, rarity: 9, frequency: 6 = 7.5]
• Oct 27th - 9:30pm - private log entry, [score: Timing: 4, Role: 7, Rarity: 9 Frequency: 9 = 7.25 ]
• Oct 18th - 5:30pm - Just an hour earlier Barry S. posted on his G+ profile about Oct 16th being Ada Lovelace day. I was curious and read a bit about her, which I already knew some, but was brushing up on the knowledge (she was the first computer programmer). I remembered that I have a book called "Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers", which was a collection of letters compiled and edited by Betty A. Toole. The book was given to me by an elementary school teacher I used to know. She got it for free at a conference or something and gave it to me in 2000, thinking it was worthless. It turns out that now the book is rare and worth around $80. I found out when I got home I found that my copy is also signed by the author. Anyways, I told my wife about it and she said it was interesting because on the previous day when she was in our daughter's elementary school she saw a sign for VIESN, which stands for Virtual Indiana Elementary School Network. I made a website for this organization back in 2000 through the same elementary school teacher. My wife and I haven't given much thought to VIESN or the book in ages, so for them both to come up together like that is odd. The VIESN project doesn't seem to be that big of a deal either because they don't seem to currently have a website and couldn't find many references too it online. So its not like this huge organization that would be prevailent through the schools. [score: timing: 3, role: 7, rarity: 8, frequency: 7 = 6.25]
• Oct. 4th - 1pm - private log entry, [score: Timing: 9 Role: 6 Rarity: 9 Frequency: 9 = 8.25 ]
• Sept 18th - 8:30am - On the short (3 minute) drive to work, I listened to the radio, which I rarely do, and happened to have on WTTS. They were playing "Read My Mind" by The Killers. I liked the song and wanted to hear the whole thing, so when I got to work, I opened up Youtube and was greeted on their front page by a big banner ad for a live "The Killers" concert that night at 7pm on Youtube. WTTS might have been playing it to promote the concert and the song isn't that old (2006) so its likely to get played a lot and the band is likely to still be promoted a lot. So its not that big of a coincidence, but at first it seemed huge. I'm rating the role high on this one because I didn't cause them to play the song or put up the banner ad. Also, I wrote to WTTS and they didn't seem to know about the concert, but I also may not have gotten that info from the DJ. The rarity is measured from my point of view. I might see this type of coincidence (song followed by promotion) every month or so. The other interesting part of this is that according to the Youtube promotion, their video was directed by Werner Herzog, who I've heard of before. I found out the following week that while at the UITS conference that Werner was actually in Bloomington the week before for a special film festival of his movies. [score: timing: 8, role: 8, rarity: 5, frequency: 2 = 5.75]
• Sept 5th - 8:45pm - This morning I had a dream about the Argus Telescope array from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the part where they ask if its being used to spy on neighbors. My dream also involved destroying it. Tonight I was checking my youtube subscriptions and came across the latest GeneralGrin remix which involved the ArgusArray [3]. [score: timing: 3, role: 6, rarity: 7, frequency: 2 = 4.5]
• Sept 3rd - 8:25pm - My daughter and I were playing Scrabble and she said "I'll put my word on a pink space (double word score)" just as I was arranging my letters to spell pink in my tile holder. On her tile holder she was able to spell her name in the same turn. We have only played Scrabble twice together and the last time was maybe a year ago. Even though the score is high, at the time it wasn't too big of a deal. Perhaps the frequency here should be measured as 1 since She could have said any word as I was spelling it througout the game. [score: timing: 9, role: 5, rarity: 8, frequency: 7 (1) = 7.25 (5.75)]
• August 25th - August 29th - You could describe this one as a bad week. I'm not going to really consider this a synchronous event so much as just a series of crazy events. It all started on Satuday the 25th when we went to go look at a Toyota Highlander at Royal South in Bloomington. We went there around 7pm and surprisingly, the doors to the car were open, so we took a look. A salesman soon came out and said they had closed an hour before and was happy that we noticed the doors where unlocked by accident. That night the tenant at our other house reported that between 5pm and 11pm (they were out for that time) there was an arc fault in the breaker box that almost caused it to catch on fire. Some of the the breakers turned out to have melt and we had to have an electrician replace all the breakers the next evening. It was strange because the breaker was on the AC and the electrician said he was surprised to see it happen. Also on Sunday, my daughter started to have a cough and get sick. I was up most of the night taking care of her. Around 3am on the morning of the 27th, I had to go into the Suso office because the AC was out due to some maintenance at the building we're in so I had to make sure things cooled down. So I didn't get much sleep that night. On Monday the 27th, my wife decide to go back to Royal South to take a test drive of the Highlander. Meanwhile, my father in law takes my daughter to her piano lesson around 5:50pm. We're no more than a minute into the test drive and he called my wife to let him know that he was in an accident. We had to cut the test drive short. When we get to the accident, we find out that what happened was a couple of teenage kids in a old Dodge Strata made a left turn behind my father in law after passing him in a parking lot and ripped off his back bumper. They ended up driving off (hit and run). They later caught them. I guess nothing really happened on Tuesday except that I picked up my daughter's cold and had to work from home on Wednesday. We were going to go to Indy that evening to look at Toyota Highlanders up there, but in the end decided not to. I made a run to the store to get a chicken to cook for dinner. On the way there, I got behind a white Toyota prius that had a Royal South logo on it, then on the way back from the store, I got behind another identical, but different white Prius (no Royal sticker) that went back towards our neighborhood. After going home, my wife started to get the chicken ready. We have a gas grill on our back porch that we like to use sometimes for its sideburner. Anyways, my wife goes to ignite the sideburner and it instead ignites a large pocket of gas that had been building up under the main grill, creating a huge fireball that goes upward. Fortunately, she got out of the way quickly enough that she wasn't hurt and I took care of turning off the gas to the grill. What had happened is that when the grill cover was slide over, it accidentally turned the knob on of the main burner's gas. The fireball melted part of our screen porch though. This was around 5:30pm. We decided just to go get KFC and not buy a car right now.
• August 25th - around 3:30pm - So this was like a double Synchronous moment involving two people having a synchronous moment. So today as you'll all find out soon, Neil Armstrong died. Ok, now that I've lost 99% of you to that, I'll move on with the remaining few who are still reading. I found out about that on this Slashdot article, which had a link to the "Obligatory XKCD" comic #893, which talks about the life expectation of moon walkers. I thought XKCD #202 was also appropriate, which talks about Youtube comments. So I went looking in the XKCD forums just to see what was said about comic 202 at the time and someone in that thread linked to Phil Plait's blog with this link (http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/12/26/moon-hoax-believers/), which that specific URL no longer works and just takes me to Phil Plait's blog's front page instead (the article is now located here), which upon clicking on the link, I see this article, which I thought may have been what was being linked too, but after comparing the dates (2006 for the XKCD thread vs. 2012-08-25 for the Everyone Jump coincidence article) I see that this article is something new, but also has to do with an XKCD coincidence between Phil and Randall. So this is quite a coincidental moment. And now I see that while writing this that Phil has already posted an article about Neil Armstrong. Phil's synchronous moment was a day apart where as mine with him was about 9 hours apart. Its hard to put the rarity and frequency numbers on this one without doing some research into Phil Plait's blog and XKCD and drawing it out. So I'll just give a rough estimate score, although the timing and frequency numbers based on my scale seem too low for this significant coincidence: [draft score: timing: 4, role: 8, rarity: 8, frequency: 3 = 5.75]
• August 22nd - around 3:15pm - After posting a 5 pin random number generating command, I was thinking of a better way to do it and considering the randomness of the numbers generated by using bash's $RANDOM variable. I then took a look at Facebook and the top post was by Larry Yeager [4] with a link to a new real random number generator in Australia. I wouldn't say my thinking or talking about random numbers is uncommon. Although it doesn't come up frequently enough to say its a regular thing. I can actually check the climagic queue file to see how often I talk about randomness and its about once or twice a month [score: timing: 8, role: 6, rarity: 3, frequency: 2 = 4.75]
• A few happened in here that I would consider minor. Maybe a 3 to 5 score range. I really should record these so I have a better range of recorded scores, its just hard to remember to do them sometimes and am busy with other things.
• August 12th - around 3pm - I was sitting at the table with my wife and father in law. They were having a conversation in Russian that I wasn't paying attention to. I was reading on my tablet computer about solar panels cells. It crossed my mind that enough solar panel cells could electricute you fatally. Then I thought of the potential of capital punishment using solar cells (not that I think that's a good thing, but the thought crossed my mind), just then without me saying anything, my wife said something about capital punishment in Russian. We rarely talk or think about capital punishment. In fact, it seemed odd to be talking or thinking about it. [score: timing: 9, role: 7, rarity: 8, frequency: 3 = 6.75]

Willy Wonka Meme Image popular during 2012

• August 9th - 2:45pm - I had commented on a post about political parties on Facebook [5] "You know that there are more than two parties right?" and then thought "This smells like one of the Willy Wonka meme images". So I went looking for the generator that makes the images to go and make what would be my first and the generator page has a leaderboard of the currently most popular. The #1 most popular one that came up read "Oh, you don't support third party candidates because you would be wasting your vote? Tell me more about how effective our bipartisan system has been." I don't really talk about politics often (try to avoid it unless I really think I'm going to have any effect, which is almost never) and this was the first time I went looking for that Willy Wonka meme generator. [score: timing: 8, role: 6, rarity: 9, frequency: 4 = 6.75]

• July 19th - 1pm - Earlier today at 1pm I went to Best Buy and PC Max seeing if anyone had a good SATA hard drive dock. Couldn't find a good one at a decent price. At 4:30pm Lord Drachenblut posted to the BLUG mailing list asking if anyone happened to have a SATA hard drive dock he could borrow. Fairly rare because I'm not in the market for one very often and people don't post to the BLUG list very often. [score: timing: 6, role: 6, rarity: 7, frequency: 5 = 6.0]

• July 15th - 11am -
  
  I was cleaning up the dining room table so that we could play Monopoly and I picked up some commemorative stamps that my wife had just bought for Legends of Latin Music. I noticed that one of the five people on them was Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, who my wife and I had watched the movie Selena together years ago. I went over to show her the stamps. Then I went downstairs to check Facebook and the image at the top of my feed was posted by Olga (my wife's sister) about 45 minutes before with the caption "на небе отличная музыка" (meaning Great Music in the Heavens).
  
  One of the people pictured was Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. For this one, I measure the rarity at 8 because I haven't really thought or talked about Selena since we watched the the movie 10 years prior. [score: timing: 7, role: 7, rarity: 8, frequency: 3 = 6.25]

• July 14th - During the day my wife and I were talking about taking a trip to South Korea in 1.5 - 2 years, which would mean my daughter would be 7 at that time. I wondered if she would be old enough that it would make an impression. That night when I checked Facebook a post near the top was by Sophia Travis (who is also half Korean like my daughter) talking about her 1972 trip to South Korea, when she was 7. One of the things she noted was that the trip is still vividly in her mind. Another coincidence was that directly below Sophia's post was a post by Wes Lasher talking about going to Red Mango, which Adela and I had also been too a couple hours before. [score: timing: 5, role: 6, rarity: 7, frequency: 4 = 5.5]

• Friday, July 13th - This wasn't so much a synchronous event as it just was an interesting coincidence. I took my daughter to the zoo this day and on the way up we decided to stop and have lunch first at the Steak n' Shake at 101 Illinois St. in Indianapolis. While in there, I realized that this was the first time I've eaten there since July of 1999 when Chris Dent and I stopped there for breakfast at 3am before he dropped me off at the train station for me to take an Amtrak train out to Arizona for my "vision quest". After I got home I checked my old e-mail and sure enough, it was Monday July 12th, 1999. Close enough to be interesting and 13 years later.

• June 22nd - After a formal in person interview with the IU CACR on the Wednesday June 13th, Von said he would get back with me the following week. I was waiting and waiting and on Friday I was beginning to wonder if I would hear anything. Around 11am, one of the other admins where I worked asked if anyone knew about a server named Vaughn (pronounced the same as Von). I had never heard of the server before. It turned out, it was having time issues. An hour later, I received an e-mail from Von saying that he'd like to move forward with offering me the position. [score: timing: 7, role: 7, rarity: 8, frequency: 3 = 6.25]

• June 6th - A week before this, I by chance ran into Jeremy Fischer, one of my bosses while working at Kiva ten years before. I haven't really talked with Jeremy in about 10 years and didn't know much about him. Although I had friended him on Facebook a couple years ago. I was working at the office and went to go get a mocha shake at Steak n' Shake (I get one maybe once every 2 weeks). On the way out of the garage, I pull up at the stop light next to Oliver Boch on his bike, who I also used to work with at Kiva and see once every few years. He said he was going to meet Jeremy at the Bishop right then. I decide to park and go in and say hi. We catch up a bit. I didn't mention anything about looking for a job at the time or IU. A week or two later (June 6th) I have a phone interview with Von Welsch about the Security Analyst job at IU CACR. He asked if I knew Jeremy because on my resume it mentioned working at Kiva. I said that he used to be my boss and he said that he also used to work with Jeremy (Small world eh? No not really.) Anyways, after my phone interview, I guess he called Jeremy and get a reference for me from him even though I hadn't given any references yet. It turned out that Jeremy became my only reference for the job that I know of. It was just kinda crazy that I hadn't talked with Jeremy for so long and in the course of two weeks, we met again and he helped me land a new job. I felt that this was a strong one because it was a major chaning point in my life. I kinda wonder if the scoring system should also include a category for "Significance of Event" or something related to your own life. Because this would score an 8 or 9 in such a category. Something else that is weird about this was that I thought on the way to Steak n' Shake how often I get a mocha shake and then run into someone from Kiva, then on the way back that night I saw Jay Nakamura parking his car next to Fountain Square, who I had also run into another time at the same Steak n' Shake the night that Bill Cook died. [score: timing: 2, role: 5, rarity: 8, frequency: 8 = 5.75]

• Some minor ones in this time frame that I forgot to write down.
• March 23rd - 8am' - Recently I have been watching Star Trek Enterprise for the first time and was curious about the andorian characters, especially the leader, whom I recognize the actor. So today I went to http://www.memory-alpha.org/, which is the Star Trek community wiki and the featured article that randomly showed up on the front page was for Thy'lek Shran, the Andorian that I was looking for.
• February 19th - 5:01:20pm - While writing up the entry for the 17th, I went to go check the GMT time on one of my servers and it was "Sun Feb 19 22:01:26 GMT 2012".
• February 19th - 4:55pm - I've been playing Words with Friends lately. Today around 2pm I was looking at one of our customer's websites to see how responsive it was. I came across the word Foaled, which I wasn't familiar with, so I looked it up. At 4:55pm, I went to one of my Words with Friend's games with Treesian and he had played the word Foal yesterday, although I didn't see it until today.
• February 17th 5:05pm - I had been waiting to post this funny error message I see in rsync sometimes to climagic. "rsync protocol version mismatch - is your shell clean?". I finally posted it on the 17th at 22:01:20 GMT (5:01 EST). Around that time I was using my Kindle and one of the games I had installed previously had a Turtle on it. Just as I was looking at the Turtle icon, I received a message from @ip2k who replied to my rsync command post saying "bro you need to hit that turtle wax wassup" [6]

• February 2nd - 3:15pm - Was adding the following comment to my Facebook update about watching Groundhog Day: "There is no Dana, only Zuul" and I look over and one of the recommended friend's names is Dana.

• February 1st - 3:33pm - Seems I've had several major image oriented coincidences in a row. Seeing http://www.twitter.com/b_d just while seeing what short twitter accounts have a underscore in them and @janmoesen saying I would love to explain, but I have to run. I am on a diet called "Beans, beans and nothing but beans" in response to me wondering where he got the idea for "ls -FatalFart"

• January 31st - blackthorne sent me this image just as his own curl http://t.co/2Y6RIJyj -s|strings|tail -n 1|base64 -d|openssl enc -d -rc4 -K $?|rev|tr '[A-Za-z]' '[N-ZA-Mn-za-m]' which says "Thank you @climagic for the follow!" The coincidence here is that in December, before blackthorne was following climagic and unbeknownst to him, I had posted a mystery image with hidden data using similar techniques.

• January 9th 5:42pm - This was during my daughter's first piano lesson of the semester. I hadn't gone to XKCD all day, when I realized I hadn't, I decided to visit it on my phone and at the exact moment that the page loaded, her teacher asked "How many As do you see?"

How many As do you see? A lot

Of course she wasn't asking me, she was asking my daughter how many of the note A in her music book. Not sure what is event A and what is event B in this case. When it happened it felt more like a curiosity than a major event. [score: timing: 10, role: 7, rarity: 8, frequency: 3 = 7.0]

2011

• December 21st, 2011
  • 9am - Was making this image for climagic feed based on a command I developed a month before and posted here. I was trying to make my prompt colored red and green and had a question about escape sequence length in the prompt, so I went into the #bash channel on Freenode to ask and after I asked, this happened:

[Sometime before this nocturnal posted the link to https://gist.github.com/1505483, looks like 8:51am]
8:58am deltaray2 joins #bash channel
8:58am <deltaray2> What is that thing you do with PS1 when using escape sequences to take the length of the prompt into account?
8:59am <geirha> man bash -> PROMPTING
9:00am <deltaray2> geirha, Ahh \[ and \]
9:00am <deltaray2> Thanks
9:00am <mute> nocturnal: that's clever
9:08am <biz> funny, reminds me of the old xsnow (mandatory at this time of the year ;)
9:09am <deltaray2> biz, what does?
9:09am <biz> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/rick/Xsnow/
9:10am <deltaray2> No I mean what reminds you of xsnow?
9:10am <biz> the link nocturnal posted earlier
9:11am <geirha> 14:51 < nocturnal> https://gist.github.com/1505483 merry xmas bash =D
9:13am <deltaray2> This is weird. As we speak I was working on an image of the terminal snowing for @climagic.

So this one was well logged and seen by many. Sontek, who made the snow script is a climagic follower and is in the #climagic channel and I was talking about him about his script on the 19th, but the coincidence all happened within a few minutes today. (New Scoring System: Timing: 8 Role: 7 Rarity: 8 Frequency: 4 = 6.75)

• December 20th, 2011
  • 8:45pm - Earlier today I re-tweeted someone's tip for climagic about finding words in the dictionary that have 3 pairs of consecutive letters. bookkeeper is such a word as are its related words like bookkeeping, etc. These are the only words in the English language with this property. Tonight one of my tickets was to disable an account and one of its e-mail only accounts was bookkeeping@theirdomain. I'll give this one an 8 because how often do I talk about bookkeeping ever, let alone in the same day. Although this didn't really have a big wow moment to it like some do. (New Scoring system: Timing: 4 Role: 4 Rarity: 7 Frequency: 3 = 4.5)

• November 3rd, 2011
  • Morning - On the way into work and before I had been on the Internet at all, I started thinking about King Arthur and pulling the sword from the stone. I get into work and one of the first things I did was checked smbc-comics.com and found this comic. I do read SMBC on a regular basis, but I might think about King Arthur once a year at most. And I don't recall SMBC ever using him as a subject before. But wait, it gets weirder. That night I was watching some Barbie cartoon (Barbie of Swan Lake) with my daughter for the first time without knowing what it was about and the theme of that cartoon was about how Barbie's character pulls a crystal from a tree and thus means that she is the chosen one to challenge some king or something. Does this story sound familiar? (Old Score: 7) (New Score: Timing: 8 Role: 7 Rarity: 7 Frequency: 2 = 6.0)

• • Lunchtime - I needed to go downtown to the office and on 3rd street I thought about calling my wife to let her know that I'd be there. Within about a minute of thinking that, she called me. This happens occasionally. (Old Score: 3) (New Score Timing: 9 Role: 7 Rarity: 3 Frequency: 2 = 5.25)

• • 3:20pm - I was searching for Ocean Girl on imdb.com because the author of pianobar mentioned it on his website. I happened to click on a link for a review of the new film which I hadn't heard about called Tree of Life. As I'm reading about it, Kyle and Ted start talking about Tree of Life, but not the movie, the local food company that is located up the street from where I work. They were talking about it because Ted had bought something from them. This one was pretty rare because I think I've heard that company mentioned only a few times in the past 10 years by anyone. I told Kyle and Ted about it and showed what I was reading on my screen and they were shocked by the occurrence as well. Later I remembered that the previous day I had been watching this video on Evolution and this video on Academic Standards. Both videos make references to the "Tree of Life" in a third way, being the tree of evolution. (Old Score: 7.5) (New Scoring Timing: 9 Role: 7 Rarity: 8 Frequency: 3 = 6.75)

• September 24th - My family was flying out to LA for vacation. At the Indianapolis International Airport, we were waiting at the gate and I noticed the guy across from me, who I thought I had seen before, perhaps around Bloomington. I didn't say anything though and thought its not a big deal. It turns out he and his wife end up sitting next to us on the plane. I still don't say anything, just leaving it go. At the end of the flight the flight attendant gave us the spiel about signing up for frequent flier miles and noted that two people on the plane were using their reward miles for a free flight that day. I saw the guy next to us raise his hand to shyly confirm that she was talking about them. We get off the plane and on the way to our next flight my wife and daughter go off to use the bathroom while I wait. A few minutes pass and the guy who was sitting next to me now comes out the bathroom and comes right over to me to make small talk. Surprised by this, I ask him if he's from Bloomington, to which he says no, he's actually from North Webster, Indiana. WHAT? I grew up 5 miles away from North Webster and had two summer jobs there. He immediately knew the places where I worked and then I thought maybe I knew him from there but we didn't recognize each others names and he would have gone to a different high school. Its not really so much of a synchronous event as it is just a chance encounter. Some people would probably say "Small World" to this one.

Several small occurrences in 2011. I guess nothing worth writing about. Just got lazy.

2010

• December 22nd, 8:25 - I was in the kitchen getting something and looked over and noticed that the 4 digit fruit code on a unique piece of fruit we had was the same last 4 digits as Marina's phone number. I picked one up to take one over to her and just as I was half way to her, her cell phone rang. I'd give this one a 6 because she receives many calls a day.
• December 22nd, ~5pm - About 4:30 I drove over to pick up my daughter from day care, on the way over I got the opening scene from STTNG: "We'll always have Paris" Stuck in my head (the fencing scene). We went home and I was trying out justin.tv and the various channels. I happened across a Star Trek TNG and Voyager channel and the episode playing was "We'll Always have Paris" and it was about half way through, so it would have started around 10 minutes after I was thinking about it. I'd rate this one a 7. I triggered both aspects, but the chances of that specific episode being played out of the 300 or so that they could have played is low.

• July 27th, 2010, ~4pm - Drove by Owen County Bank on West 46 near Ellettsville. The temperature display read 127 degrees (7-bit register limit problem obviously). Anyways, I tried to take a picture of it with my phone and when I get home to take a look, I notice that the picture is actually picture #127 on my phone.

• May 9th, 2010, ~7pm - Went to China Star for dinner tonight (on Mother's Day 2010) and check out what the fortune cookie told me to learn in Chinese.

Mother's Day fortune cookie on Mother's Day

I showed it to a few of the employees there and they were all surprised by the coincidence. I asked one of the owners how often they buy fortune cookies and they say that these they bought like 4-8 weeks ago. So the frequency of purchase is low. The frequency of Mother's Day is obviously lower. There is the possibility that at the fortune cookie factory they change the theme of their fortunes according to the time of year.

I haven't been to China Star in a few years and only go to a place with fortune cookies maybe once a month. In case you're curious, the fortune itself was "Relish the transitions in your life - they will happen regardless." I'd say this one rates about a 6 out of 10. Someone else might have gotten that fortune today from the bowl so I guess I was just lucky. I searched twitter for "fortune cookie" to see if anyone else had gotten something similar but couldn't find any cases recently.

• April 29th, 2010, 9am - I just happened to be going through my suso@suso.org mail (something I don't do often) and I found notices about suso.org expiring. And it actually expires today. Glad I caught that. I felt as if that's the only reason I decided to catch up that mail today was to notice that. Its actually been like 9 years since I renewed it last, just renewed it for another 9.

• April 16th, 2010, approx. 9:30am - A picture is worth a thousand words.

Car I got behind at Starbucks this morning on the way into the office

• April 14th, 2010, approx. 6:50am - Interestingly enough, today I would up stopped at the exact same spot before the light at 46 and Smith Pike and the truck that was stopped in front of me had the license plate number 161948. Now we have a statistic that is more measurable. The chances of encountering a license plate number containing a 4 digit sequence within one digit (up or down) on two days is about 1 in 3333.

• April 13th, 2010, approx. 7:20am - I was running late this morning and pulled out onto 46 behind a lady that was also coming out from Deer Park division as well. She pulled into the right lane and stopped at the stop light like me. I was right behind her and then a red trans am flew by us in the right turn lane and I noticed that he had the same number of license plate as the lady in front of me. 1949. They were both Indiana Specialty plates (one an In God We Trust and the other a Environmental one). They only had 4 numbers each. The two letter part didn't match, but it was still interesting. The chances of that happening are low, but of course when you are driving its like rolling the dice constantly. However this is a good example of a synchronous moment that I didn't have control over and was just an observer. I was probably also the only observer of it since we were stopped and the other car was moving. 5 out of 10

• March 15th, 2010, .com scan and anniversary coincidence. I decided to run a scan of all 2 letter domain combinations today on the .com domain to see if anything had become available or was going to soon. Of course, all combinations are taken. Later, around 5pm a story shows up on Slashdot about it being the 25th anniversary of the .com gTLD. [7]. Both parts of this coincidence were rare. But I'm not sure how strong the coincidence is. It was interesting but I don't feel like its all that strong, maybe a 6 out of 10.

• Feb. 28th, 2010 - 8pm, Enya Book of Days event - To prelude this a little is interesting. See, I can listen to Pandora radio on my cell phone and I often take it with me in the car to listen to the various stations I have setup. I usually listen to Tangerine Dream, Squarepusher or something like that. But today, when the family went out to eat, I put in squarepusher at first because Adela likes it, then as a contrast I switched over to Enya. It played a few songs before we arrived at the restaurant. By accident, I left it out in the car, playing on. It probably played for about an hour or so. When I got home, I went back out on my own to pick up some cough drops from CVS for Marina. While in CVS, they were playing Enya's Book of Days as background music. I thought it was interesting because the song is about 18 years old now and I remember when it came out as a song to the soundtrack Far and Away, which I saw at the time. Anyways, I got out to the car and I thought, wouldn't that be funny if I turned on Pandora and it was playing the same song. So I started driving back, I turned on Pandora, it was half way through some song I can't remember. The next track that came up sure enough was Enya's Book of Days. This felt like a pretty strong one because I had already been playing Pandora on the Enya channel a lot already and Book of Days could have come up while I was in the restaurant not listening and Pandora plays lots of other artists of course. The timing seemed pretty incredulous.

• Feb 17th, 2010, around 8pm - Ran into Stan Gerbig, Chris Dent and Chris' girlfriend Sarah on the north east side of the courthouse square. The only interesting part about this is that it was about a year to the day of the previous encounter and around the same time of day and interestingly enough, I had just bought a coffee mocha shake from Steak and Shake, just like last time. I later tweeted about this noting that I don't think Chris really lives in England because I see him fairly often in B-town but have never seen him in England.

• Jan 15th, 2010 around 9:50pm - Earlier I received a call from someone who was coming down to meet me at the Suso office and coming from Indy. He called me on the road somewhere in Indy and I didn't even know where. He said he was on his way and guessed it would be an hour or so. After the call I started a timer in Gnome for 50 minutes. Within 5 seconds after the timer hit 0, he knocked on the door.

2009

• September 3rd, 2010 around 9pm - Probably the most coincidental moments I've ever had. While at Red Hat Summit in Chicago, I was returning a little early from the conference event that was at the Museum of Science and Industry. It was the same night as a Bears game so there was lots of traffic and the buses had trouble managing to get back to the hotels in a decent amount of time. Also, they turned off the AC so it was getting really hot. A few of us got off at a stop a few blocks from the hotels to just walk. I managed to time it just right and got off the bus early only to find myself running into Jake Andrews (rubydog189) (youtube video user I subscribe to) in front of me at 7-11, even though he is from New England. The chances of this were like 1 in a billion. It turns out that he goes to school in Chicago now. And I had just watched one of his latest videos earlier that day. This even makes up for all those times when I thought I saw someone I knew. It IS possible.

• Jun 18th, 2009 around 9am - I was sitting in Chris Creech's cube and I noticed that a shipping box said From: Roger Wall To: Michael Kohlman and I was making fun of that it looks like Roger Wall was sending Kohlman a Qlogic rack mounting system. About a second later Roger Wall was paged by the operator. This isn't too strong because Roger Wall gets paged at least once a day. However it was pretty close.

• Feb. 28th, 2009 noon exactly - I was on my way in to meet Chris Creech and I decided to stop at Menards to look at shelving for the office. On the way to the office I was going up 3rd street by Marsh and decided to call Chris to let him know I'd be a few minutes late. When Chris answered, I said hi then I noticed that his car was in front of me in the left lane. I saw that he was talking on his phone. Very strange. Its funny because on the way in, he followed me the rest of the way and at the Patterson Street stop light, I went through a yellow and he didn't realize it was changing, slammed on his brakes and almost lost control of his car.

• Feb. 26th, 2009 around 8:30pm - I went to the North side Steak and Shake to get a Coffee Mocha shake on the way into the office and saw through the window Stan Gerbig. I decided to go in and say hi and to my surprise Chris Dent and Matt Liggett where sitting at the table with him. Very strange since Chris is now living in England and Matt is living in Delaware. So what the hell where they doing there? The total for their bill was $19.94 and the store number for that SnS is 222. Both of which are significant numbers to me as being the year I graduated HS and my apartment number when I lived downtown and knew them.

I stopped tracking them for a while in here because they weren't quite as strong. Or I just didn't take the time to write them down

2007

• May 10th, 2007 9:17am - Been a while since I've had a major one. This was a pretty strong one. Earlier, Ray called me over to check out what Sean was looking at on his screen, it was "The Bean" sculture in Millineum Park in Chicago. I later went to the Wikipedia article and read about the controversy related to photographing the piece for commercial use. I continued to read about it at http://newurbanist.blogspot.com/2005/01/copyrighting-of-public-space.html and upon reading the comments, I read one that had "That's the kind of arrangement worked out between the Andy Warhol Foundation and Campbell's Soup." A few minutes later I went to the front page of Wikipedia only to find that the featured article is Campbell's soup cans and prominently displays Andy Warhol. Now this could be described as some kind of retroactive coincidence because Wikipedia plans their featured articles several days or weeks in advance. I need to find out what drove Sean to look at the sculpture of The Bean. It turns out that he was looking at it because it was a picture on a laptop that he was working on and he just wanted to know more about it. They called me over because they figured I'd know where it was.

• February 4th-5th, 2007 (haven't confirmed all the info yet) - Without knowing that it was damaged, I decided to make the weather device that I had taken a picture of back in August the mystery picture of the week. Either that night or the next day, the device was damaged: http://www.bloomingpedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Mystery-picture-20076.jpg This was definately the most provable and public syncronous event I've experienced. And also not based on thoughts but simply on events.

• January 19th, 2007 - I have to fast today until 10am due to my scheduled health screening. This morning on Slashdot at 7:45 the have a micro article called "Ask Slashdot: What Breakfast Gets You Going?". Oh the torture.

2006

• December 18th (Monday) 1:30pm - I stopped in Chris' cube to tie my shoes and he said "You got dung on your shoes?". Then I told him about the episode of "Still Standing" where they egg someone's house and as an appology take some brownies over in a brown bag and somehow it catches fire and the guy stomps it out. Anyways, seconds after I tell this story, I walk through the bldg A cafeteria and they are playing I'm Still Standing by Elton John. Now this is odd because they usually only play country music down there.

• December 11th (Monday) - I was looking for a video on paperclip jumping and came across this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad7OlyzRyKc I hadn't mentioned anything about it. And then I heard Kyle across the room say I need to make a copy of my ass on that thing (refering to our copier). He then said he was not sure if its strong enough to support him. These incidents happened within about a minute of each other.

• A few in this time that I can't remember and didn't record.

• October 20th, (Friday) - Not really all that syncronous, except it is one week later and its close enough to be interesting. On Friday the 13th I discovered that all sets of numbers whose digits add up to X, all have differences between them that add up to 9. Today, around 11:15 Kyle Hopkins told me about this website http://www.break.com/games/pick_a_number.html that guesses what symbol you are looking at. It turns out that it is based on a simular property of 9s.

• September 4th: (Monday, Labor Day) - In the afternoon, we went to the east side Krogers. We bought saurkraut and the bagger asked us if saurkraut was really sour? I said kinda and I mentioned my German heritage, just then I turned and noticed that our Cashier's name was Danika, but I thought it was Danka. But close enough.

• May 9th: (Tuesday) - I wrote to someone in my buddy list thinking all this time that it was the other Mark Krenz from Wisconsin that I had talked to before. Turns out it is someone from Bloomington, but strangely enough they were just up in Madison Wisconsin this morning.

• May 6th. in the afternoon - This one freaked Marina out. On the way back from Jenny Stavros's party about 7-8pm, we were driving up Roger's street and for a few minutes we started talking about dogs because Jay had brought his big dog to the party. I asked Marina what breed names they had in the Soviet Union and she explained a few, when she said that Poddle was Poodle in Russian too (with an accent), I looked up the road and right at that moment I lady started walking across the Rogers/4th street intersection with a huge black poddle all groomed nicely. I pointed it out to Marina and she said "Ok, this is getting really weird Mark". This one also shows that its not always something related to my thinking or saying something, its stuff that happens around me as I wasn't the one that choose to say poodle.

• May 5th - Marina and I were sitting out on the front porch around 9pm and talking. In the midst of talking about pools for a short moment, a truck for "Parker Pools" drives by. Now there are no pools in Woodgate, but I think there is someone who lives there and works for them. So its not a strong coincidence, but it was still good timing.

• May 2nd, 1:50pm, just 6 minutes after another syncronous event - Over the past 20 minutes (from about 1:30 on) I was analyzing the logs for bloomingpedia.org by hand using "sort | uniq" pipes to find the number of unique visitors that had visited bloomingpedia since its inception. I started to narrow down to just filter out IP addresses and also wanted to just get the unique class Cs. Interestingly enough the number of unique addresses total was 9000 and the number of unique IPs alone was 1241. Anyways, right after I had explained to my co-worker Kelli about synchronicity and then I went back to doing the unique IPs, up pops a new article notification for Slashdot for an article called "Unique Visitors = 1/10th of Unique IPs?" - http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/02/1654239 . This was highly unusual and the timing was so close. I told Kelli about how an event just happened again. She said "Maybe something is going to happen to you."

• Undetermined time in 2006: Sometime during my wife's pregnancy, we went to a birthing class at Bloomington Hospital. During the class we were supposed to say traits that we liked in our spouses that we hoped to see in our children. When my time came, I said "I like it that my wife is strong willed" and just then a poster in the classroom fell down off the wall. Everyone thought it was a funny coincidence. As of 2016 we still tell this story to other people. [Score: timing: 10, role: 7, rarity: 9, frequency: 9 = 8.75]

Prior to keeping track of them

• Summer 2005 - I had been thinking about doing Bloomingpedia for a few years at this point, I finally started work on it in June and July of 2005. I registered the domain bloomingpedia.org on June 22nd, 2005 and the site was officially launched on July 24th, 2005. Another Bloomington related portal that used the more traditional forum/directory based approach called Bloomingtononline.net had its domain registered July 5th, 2005 and was launched the first week in August, 2005. I ended up meeting Dale Staton and becoming friends with him later even though we didn't know each other prior or one another's intentions to make a community portal type site. Bloomingpedia and Bloomingtononline.net have since then been the two of the dominant community websites for Bloomington. I'm inflating the timing outside the normal guidelines on this one because in terms of domain registration and the potential time in which these two sites could have started, the timing was fairly close. [score (based on Dec 2011 scoring system): timing: 5 role: 6 rarity: 9 frequency: 9 = 7.25]
• ~2004 - Marina and I were at Donato's pizza around 7pm and I just happned to be talking about baseball (very rare). Right as I started talking about it the girl in the booth next to me had her cell phone start ringing and her personalized ringer was "Take me out to the ballgame". This one was very weird because I rarely talk about baseball and take me out to the ball game seems like an odd ringtone to have. [score (based on Dec 2011 scoring system): timing: 9 role: 7 rarity: 6 frequency: 2 = 6.0]
• July 1999 - Around this time I was also running a fan website called the Philip Glass Library for the composer Philip Glass, had met him a few times and was a big collector of his music and albums. I would say that he's obscure, but not too obscure. Musicians usually know who he is. Also around this time I was starting to use the pseudo-name Suso Banderas. Anyways, I was taking a train ride out to Arizona for vacation. On the train I sat next to this woman (single serving friend in Fight Club parlance) who through most of the trip was listening to her walkman (yes, it really was a cassette tape player). At some point I asked her what she was listening to, she responded "Oh you probably haven't heard of him, his name is Philip Glass". Ha!!! As I got to talking to her, I decided to introduce myself as my real name instead of Suso Banderas. Without mentioning anything to her about using a pseudoname, she mentioned that she was happy I gave my real name and that someone she talked to recently gave out an obvious fake name. It was really weird that this came up without me talking about my pseudoname. Why? I didn't mention anything about it.

• August 1993 - This one feels more like a guardian angel type of incident. So my high school friends Eric, Keith and I went up to a state park about 30 miles away to camp and took my parent's Dodge Caravan. Around 11pm I had to go back to the parking lot to get something from the car. The parking lot was devoid of people as most where camping. I then made the mistake of locking my keys in my car. What could I do? We'd be stuck there and would have to wait for parents the next day if I couldn't get back in the car. Then a few minutes later I saw a woman in her 30s walking over to her car at night and decided to ask for help. First of all, its amazing that she didn't scream considering it was night in a vacant area, then I told her what had happened and asked if she could try her car key on my car. She did and incredibly enough her car key opened my car. WHAT ARE THE CHANCES! I've heard that they used to only make like a few thousand different key combinations, but then there is the fact that the only other person who came to the lot also had the same Caravan and at the same time I was there. Seems like a 1 in 100,000 type of chance. I'll try [ Score: Timing: 8, role: 7, rarity: 9, frequency: 8 = 8.0 ]

• There were others before 2005 this that I remember having, but can't remember exactly what happened right now.