skeletonbow: That only works for people that believe in the existence of luck, for which I am not included. ;) It's all science and math for me. ;)
If you take 25 people at random and put them in a room together, there is a higher than 50% chance that two people will share the same birthday - a single day out of the year. (This is known as the Birthday Paradox) To the mind this seems highly improbable, much like a previous example I gave of having a lottery ticket with consecutive numbers on it. But the math is rock solid on this despite what our individual emotions and beliefs might be. It's all random chance.
Tarnicus: I love statistics, especially probability and was unaware of this! I love that your post is #13733, and that 33 is my lucky synchronistic number :)
If you love coincidences and math, then you're going to love this too... Here is the most annoying bug report that I had to deal with regularly from Red Hat bugzilla eons ago:
Bug #73733. Note the bug ID number. :) The reason I remember this bug number some 10+ years later is that I looked at it almost every day forever or so it seemed, and "73" is a HAM radio code which is often used to close a conversation by HAMs and while I don't remember the precice meaning it is often used as a sort of "goodbye", and since the bug report was basically a "we don't support that, go away, thanks goodbye" bug funnel, I liked to think of the "7373" at the start of it as meaning "goodbye" or "goodbyes", and some colleagues were HAMs and thought that was pretty funny also. Is it a coincidence that my post was 13733 sharing 4 of 5 digits with that bug report? Luck? Miracle? $deity did it? Random nonsense coincidence? We may never know the answer to these things! Join us on next week's program where we discover... is it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q4F-kvWY7A ;oP
On a side note, I don't have or believe in lucky numbers per se, but there is a number which I have observed frequently since I was 16 and it always catches my attention - 723. I've researched this phenomenon from a mathematical and psychological perspective and it is an interesting pattern matching thing the brain does despite it looking like a particular number appears often out of nowhere for those that experience it. Many people who experience or observe this often attribute it to being a lucky or unlucky number or some other significance, however I just think it is an interesting coincidence and feature of the human brain. Might or might not be similar to what you mention above. :) There is a book called "Phantoms of the Brain" which explores many such oddities of the brain which is just fascinating to read.