Rough Week?
Well, hey, just be glad that you aren't one of the Seven Most Bizarrely Unlucky People who ever Lived.
Number one on the list is the only human being ever to be nuked twice. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima in the when the first bomb hit and Nagasaki when the second one hit and lived (until quite recently) to tell the tale. The link to this story comes via Jim Elvidge, who espouses an interesting variation on the Simulation Hypothesis. Per Elvidge, anomalies such as these can be viewed as Easter eggs -- little clues that our universe may be, if not an outright practical joke, perhaps an excessively elaborate work of performance art.
I'm not sure that any of these coincidences rise to the bizarreness level required to question the universe around me, but the guy who got struck by lightning seven times is pretty interesting. I can't quite get my head around the odds against that, as stated in the linked article. It seems that human history could have run many times over without this ever happening.
So it's an outlier, for sure. But proof that the world is a simulation? I'll need something even weirder, I'm afraid.
We interviewed Elvidge a while back and are looking to have him back on the podcast soon.
Comments
There is some bad luck here to be sure.
But that one lady was not really unlucky, unless you count being stupid. I was taking a picture of my friend and I fell off the boat- woe is me. No - you is stupid.
Lightning guy
He had some bad luck, but also, you guessed it - he was stupid.
Hey, I was just up on this watch tower, framed with wood but with all manner of metallic antannae and a metal roof, in a thunder storm and the lightning just came and got me.
Ok, he had a job that required him, apparently, to be at risk but hey - lightning boy, douse the fire on your head and hang your clothes out after the freakin' storm.
The meteor target lady (also an idiot, but not because she got hit by a meteor)
was really unlucky. I mean, couch potatoes are supposed to live three or four meteres underground? c'mon, that's just bad luck.
ANd the atomic x2 dude was unlucky, but I can think of way more freakishly unlucky WAR victims. In fact, this guy was more lucky than un. He lived to be 93, 60+ years after the whole atomic blasts thingy.
Posted by: MDArling | January 8, 2010 11:08 AM
Light is a good argument for the simulation hypothesis. Sometimes it's a particle. Sometimes it's a wave. Clearly the programmers reused code from two other simulations which had different definitions of how light is supposed to work. So the result you get depends on which piece of code is called.
;-)
Posted by: Karl Gallagher | January 11, 2010 09:44 AM
There were about 160 people that survived both bombs, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nijyuu_hibakusha#Double_survivors
Posted by: Doug Jones | January 11, 2010 08:04 PM