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August 11, 2002, Sunday MAGAZINE DESK The Odds of That By Lisa Belkin (NYT) 8179 words When the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side street, near the empty spot where hehad habitually parked his Ford Explorer. At about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, awhite rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of Memphis, where he had just had a jovial dinnerwith friends. The following week, Vladimir Pasechnik collapsed in London, apparently of a stroke. The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four nerve-jangling months. Stabbed in Leesburg, Va. Suffocatedin an air-locked lab in Geelong, Australia. Found wedged under a chair, naked from the waist down, in a blood-splatteredapartment in Norwich, England. Hit by a car while jogging. Killed in a private plane crash. Shot dead while a pizzadelivery man served as a decoy. What joined these men was their proximity to the world of bioterror and germ warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked,was a researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as anyone abouthow the immune system responds to attacks from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was Russian, and before he defected, hehelped the Soviets transform cruise missiles into biological weapons. The chain of deaths -- these three men and eightothers like them -- began last fall, back when emergency teams in moonsuits were scouring the Capitol, when postalworkers were dying, when news agencies were on high alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its mail. In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths might not have been noticed, but these are not ordinary times. Neighborsreport neighbors to the F.B.I.; passengers are escorted off planes because they make other passengers nervous; medicaljournals debate what to publish, for fear the articles will be read by evil eyes. Now we are spooked and startled by storieslike these -- all these scientists dying within months of one another, at the precise moment when tiny organisms loom as agargantuan threat. The stories of these dozen or so deaths started out as a curiosity and were transformed rumor by rumorinto the specter of conspiracy as they circulated first on the Internet and then in the mainstream media. What are theodds, after all? What are the odds, indeed? For this is not about conspiracy but about coincidence -- unexpected connections that are both riveting and rattling. Muchreligious faith is based on the idea that almost nothing is coincidence; science is an exercise in eliminating the taint ofcoincidence; police work is often a feint and parry between those trying to prove coincidence and those trying to provecomplicity. Without coincidence, there would be few movies worth watching (''Of all the gin joints in all the towns in allthe world, she walks into mine''), and literary plots would come grinding to a disappointing halt. (What if Oedipus hadnot happened to marry his mother? If Javert had not happened to arrive in the town where Valjean was mayor?) The true meaning of the word is ''a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparentcausal connection.'' In other words, pure happenstance. Yet by merely noticing a coincidence, we elevate it to somethingthat transcends its definition as pure chance. We are discomforted by the idea of a random universe. Like Mel Gibson'scharacter Graham Hess in M. Night Shyamalan's new movie ''Signs,'' we want to feel that our lives are governed by agrand plan. The need is especially strong in an age when paranoia runs rampant. ''Coincidence feels like a loss of control perhaps,''says John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of ''Innumeracy,'' the improbablebest seller about how Americans don't understand numbers. Finding a reason or a pattern where none actually exists''makes it less frightening,'' he says, because events get placed in the realm of the logical. ''Believing in fate, or evenconspiracy, can sometimes be more comforting than facing the fact that sometimes things just happen.''In the past year there has been plenty of conspiracy, of course, but also a lot of things have ''just happened.'' And whileour leaders are out there warning us to be vigilant, the statisticians are out there warning that patterns are not always whatthey seem. We need to be reminded, Paulos and others say, that most of the time patterns that seem stunning to us aren'teven there. For instance, although the numbers 9/11 (9 plus 1 plus 1) equal 11, and American Airlines Flight 11 was thefirst to hit the twin towers, and there were 92 people on board (9 plus 2), and Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year (2 plus5 plus 4), and there are 11 letters each in ''Afghanistan,'' ''New York City'' and ''the Pentagon'' (and while we're counting,in George W. Bush), and the World Trade towers themselves took the form of the number 11, this seeming numericalmessage is not actually a pattern that exists but merely a pattern we have found. (After all, the second flight to hit thetowers was United Airlines Flight 175, and the one that hit the Pentagon was American Airlines Flight 77, and the onethat crashed in a Pennsylvania field was United Flight 93, and the Pentagon is shaped, well, like a pentagon.) The same goes for the way we think of miraculous intervention. We need to be told that those lucky last-minute stops foran Egg McMuffin at McDonald's or to pick up a watch at the repair shop or to vote in the mayoral primary -- stops thatsaved lives of people who would otherwise have been in the towers when the first plane hit -- certainly looked likemiracles but could have been predicted by statistics. So, too, can the most breathtaking of happenings -- like the sparrowthat happened to appear at one memorial service just as a teenage boy, at the lectern eulogizing his mom, said the word''mother.'' The tiny bird lighted on the boy's head; then he took it in his hand and set it free. Something like that has to be more than coincidence, we protest. What are the odds? The mathematician will answer thateven in the most unbelievable situations, the odds are actually very good. The law of large numbers says that with a largeenough denominator -- in other words, in a big wide world -- stuff will happen, even very weird stuff. ''The reallyunusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens,'' explains Persi Diaconis, a Stanford


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