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Scotty

Story, Wednesday September 7, 2016

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25 minutes ago, malloyd said:

 

Firstly: Susan and Diane are half-sisters, which would require Susan's cheating father to have got two unrelated women pregnant within days, and for either (1) the two mothers to be so biologically similar that they each gave birth only moments apart, despite 40 weeks' worth of pregnancy, or (2) that despite different pregnancies, they gave birth only moments part anyway (e.g. one was late, the other was induced etc. and it all magically aligned).

 

For the first, pregnancy timing is simply not that tightly constrained - *normal* variation is 5 weeks.

That was my point, actually. There's so much natural variation that it would be frankly astounding if either (1) two mothers impregnated at the same time gave birth at the same time, or (2) two mothers impregnated at different times nonetheless varied exactly enough to give birth at the same time. Occam's razor says that if Susan and Diane were born almost exactly at the same time (which may well not be true, of course, and it only needs to not be true for one of them), and they resemble each other, it's because they have the same mother. Having the same father is a very easy next step; having different fathers is unusual but slightly plausible? Having the same father but different mothers, but nonetheless born within 20 minutes of each other? We're getting into "I'm totally a human" t-shirt territory.

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21 hours ago, Scotty said:
22 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Well I would also expect Tedd would try. He's teenager. Not warning teenagers about rushing into things is leading cause of pregnancy between people lacking sex education.

There are some that argue that sex education increases the likelihood of teenagers trying it at a younger age.

Yeah ... usually the same ones who don't believe in evolution. If you DO believe in evolution, you would realize how hard would be to fight against that billions of years of it. Lot of software claims to have intuitive interface: there are only two intuitive interfaces, breast-to-mouth and the one used in sex and causing pregnancy.

There are thousands of people who proved that having sex is simpler than walking straight: you can do it more intoxicated.

And regarding age: boys at a younger age avoid girls and talk about cooties. Also, it's hard to have sex without erection.

21 hours ago, malloyd said:

The major hole is that a lot of people in this town *do* know Elliot by name already.  For anybody outside Moperville, Edward is probably right, but then my impression is most people outside Moperville pretty much dismiss news from it as nonsense anyway.

Moperville might be big enough to contain lot of people who do NOT know Elliot. But I'm sure the ones who know would still make pretty big crowd around Dunkel's house.

21 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

There's a quicker way to find the Dunkel family: Check for lottery winners. Another brilliant Edward Verres plan.

I don't think there was that many lotteries rigged. More likely, they won one or few and then the thing with monthly payment was prepared with some financial institution.

21 hours ago, skington said:

That was my point, actually. There's so much natural variation that it would be frankly astounding if either (1) two mothers impregnated at the same time gave birth at the same time, or (2) two mothers impregnated at different times nonetheless varied exactly enough to give birth at the same time. Occam's razor says that if Susan and Diane were born almost exactly at the same time (which may well not be true, of course, and it only needs to not be true for one of them), and they resemble each other, it's because they have the same mother. Having the same father is a very easy next step; having different fathers is unusual but slightly plausible? Having the same father but different mothers, but nonetheless born within 20 minutes of each other? We're getting into "I'm totally a human" t-shirt territory.

Well, both opinions are true: Of course, Occam's razor would say them being born from same mother is more likely. On the other hand, coincidences DO happen and can be more common that they seem - see birthday paradox. Actually, let's see ... ignoring the "being same" part, if we want probability 95% to have two people born at same half hour, that would be ... 104971 people if I count correctly. In group of 104971 people of same age, there is 95% probability that two had been born same half hour. Sure, that's pretty big, but it's not "impossibly" big.

The main issue here is Chekhov's gun: things like this happen more often in reality than in fiction, because in fiction, it makes no sense from a plot point of view.  Unless, of course, it's a deliberate red herring.

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53 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

 Well, both opinions are true: Of course, Occam's razor would say them being born from same mother is more likely. On the other hand, coincidences DO happen and can be more common that they seem - see birthday paradox. Actually, let's see ... ignoring the "being same" part, if we want probability 95% to have two people born at same half hour, that would be ... 104971 people if I count correctly. In group of 104971 people of same age, there is 95% probability that two had been born same half hour. Sure, that's pretty big, but it's not "impossibly" big.

Assuming I'm doing my math right, the probably tops 50% when you hit 158 people (365 days, 48 half hours per day for 17,520 half hours in a year; may have been better to do it as 00:00-00:30, 00:01-00:31, etc, but this should be a decent enough approximation). In a town with two high schools, I would expect to have way more than 158 people in the same grade across both schools. So you're definitely edging in to the "very likely" territory.

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4 minutes ago, EmpactWB said:
1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Well, both opinions are true: Of course, Occam's razor would say them being born from same mother is more likely. On the other hand, coincidences DO happen and can be more common that they seem - see birthday paradox. Actually, let's see ... ignoring the "being same" part, if we want probability 95% to have two people born at same half hour, that would be ... 104971 people if I count correctly. In group of 104971 people of same age, there is 95% probability that two had been born same half hour. Sure, that's pretty big, but it's not "impossibly" big.

Assuming I'm doing my math right, the probably tops 50% when you hit 158 people (365 days, 48 half hours per day for 17,520 half hours in a year; may have been better to do it as 00:00-00:30, 00:01-00:31, etc, but this should be a decent enough approximation). In a town with two high schools, I would expect to have way more than 158 people in the same grade across both schools. So you're definitely edging in to the "very likely" territory.

... ok. I did my math wrong (forgot square root). On second try, the number for 95% is 324 (and 50% is 156). Considering how big those schools seem to be, even 324 may not be that big number ... so, seems very likely.

 

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5 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

... ok. I did my math wrong (forgot square root). On second try, the number for 95% is 324 (and 50% is 156). Considering how big those schools seem to be, even 324 may not be that big number ... so, seems very likely.

But we're not talking about 300-odd married couples having a child. We're talking about Susan's father and J Random Fertile Female having a child, pretty much exactly at the same time as Susan's father and Susan's mother. Unless Susan's father is able to fertilise local women en-masse, statistics aren't going to help us here.

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24 minutes ago, skington said:
39 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

... ok. I did my math wrong (forgot square root). On second try, the number for 95% is 324 (and 50% is 156). Considering how big those schools seem to be, even 324 may not be that big number ... so, seems very likely.

But we're not talking about 300-odd married couples having a child. We're talking about Susan's father and J Random Fertile Female having a child, pretty much exactly at the same time as Susan's father and Susan's mother. Unless Susan's father is able to fertilise local women en-masse, statistics aren't going to help us here.

Statistics WILL help, but it will not do the work for us.

The probability depends on how many variables you fix. Sure, if it's specifically about Susan, then the probability is much lower, and Occam's razor will support the "twin" idea. On the other hand, we can speculate how Susan's father might decide to impregnate someone at similar time, which makes the probability little higher than taking all half-hours in year as equally probable. The fact that it's not just any half-hour but New Year's midnight is another case like that - less likely to be random, but there may be actual reason why he may be trying for that time.

But on the other hand, if they WOULDN'T find another person having similar date, they wouldn't comment it. Do we comment what is the likehood that no character in comics is born as same half-hour as Sarah? Of course not. So, what MUST be fixed? Well ... we are looking for group of cheaters in Moperville: IF someone is cheating enough to have child from that, it's likely it will result in divorce and create experience very similar to Susan's, so basically, we are looking for 156 cheating men who had child both with wife and mistress in same year. Harder than just 156 children, but ... wait. No. The number will be bigger because it must be the same cheating men ... hmmm ... ok, birthday paradox will not help us here, we would need actual statistics about the length of pregnancy ...

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1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Moperville might be big enough to contain lot of people who do NOT know Elliot. But I'm sure the ones who know would still make pretty big crowd around Dunkel's house.

Moperville South High School is big enough that a junior there, meeting another person of the same age whom he doesn't recognize as someone he's seen before, assumes it's plausible that this other person ALSO attends that school. Moperville North is apparently of similar size.

28 minutes ago, skington said:

But we're not talking about 300-odd married couples having a child. We're talking about Susan's father and J Random Fertile Female having a child, pretty much exactly at the same time as Susan's father and Susan's mother. Unless Susan's father is able to fertilise local women en-masse, statistics aren't going to help us here.

There's a funny thing about probabilities: if the probability of something isn't precisely zero, then given enough opportunities the probability of it happening at least once approaches certainty (never quite reaching it, but arbitrarily close) - and it's just as likely to happen on the first opportunity as on the thousandth or millionth.

Also known as, random coincidences really do happen for no reason at all.

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Yeah, really all the Birthday Paradox shows is how plausible Edward's coincidence theory is for explaining the birth times (remarkably). Our info is insufficient to address the whole of it.

Of course, "switched at birth" seems as unlikely as the separate mothers thing. Wikipedia shows only three discovered cases so far this century. Although one of those was a case of one identical twin accidentally being switched to a random family, which seems oddly relevant. If Susan was switched out to a family while the real Tiffany Pompoms was given up for adoption in her place alongside Diane, that explains everything without having to mess with the cheating father.

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28 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

The fact that it's not just any half-hour but New Year's midnight is another case like that - less likely to be random, but there may be actual reason why he may be trying for that time.

Oddly that may make it less likely to be non-random, though Dan may or may not know that.  In the US anyway scheduled births, or ones that can reasonably be hastened or delayed a day, generally don't happen on holidays, to the extent that January 1 is the second least common birthday, following December 25 and followed by December 24 and July 4.  Birth rates for the entire two week period from the end of December to the beginning of January is actually noticeably depressed, as is the week Thanksgiving will fall in in late November. 

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On 9/9/2016 at 7:28 PM, Scotty said:

There are some that argue that sex education increases the likelihood of teenagers trying it at a younger age. Then again, our premier designed the curriculum to include some hardcore stuff, she's not very popular right now...

Nonsense! They have the protection of the magical shield of ignorance!

 

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Probability theory is funny. Roughly speaking everything is possible and nothing is impossible, they are just more or less probable.

If we look at the birthday problem the probability that two people share the same birthday in a town as large as Moperville is certainly approaching 100%. Even if we limit ourself to the high schools it's quite high. That two girls in high school were born within 24 hours of each other is also large, but when we start adding complications the numbers change. First complication is that we are not talking about sharing just the same day and month but the same year. The birthday paradox only is talking about day in the year, so the numbers change. If my information is correct then High school in the US usually is grades 9 through 12, so statistically that leaves just one quarter of the students in the pool. Next we are just interested in about half of the population, namely girls, so the base numbers are halved. Of the remaining only those who are natural blonde need apply, for the US that's statistically somewhere between 2% and 10%. Either way it cuts the number of candidates quite drastically. And then there is the time of delivery, because not only were they born within 24 hours of each other, but actually within 20 minutes (afair). Statistically that leaves 1 out of 72, or 1.3%. Then there is things like eye color, length (hard to quantify due to magic intervention on Susan's part), body type, shape of the face and the eyes, and I'd say it's a pretty amazing coincidence if it turns out that Susan and Diane isn't twins.

Note that "an amzing coincidence" isn't impossible, just highly improbable, but then the Three Mile Island incidence had a probability calculated to be so low that it was basically impossible, and yet it happened...
 

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Average public school size 1999-2000

The average in the US was 752, the average for Illinois (wasn't Moperville based on Naperville?) is 713. Quarter for the grade, double for the two schools, halve for just girls, so 188/178, with 26,280 twenty minute blocks in a year. So somewhere in the vicinity of 45-49% of it happening at least once on those numbers. Hair and eye colors are something we shouldn't try to estimate, since additional natural colors are possible in the EGS world. And, as observed elsewhere, magic is a huge dork and might deliberately be trolling everyone.

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2 hours ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

Then there is things like eye color, length (hard to quantify due to magic intervention on Susan's part), body type, shape of the face and the eyes, and I'd say it's a pretty amazing coincidence if it turns out that Susan and Diane isn't twins.
 

By "length", do you mean body height? Because hair length is something that has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with the choices of the person (and that person's parents).

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19 minutes ago, ijuin said:

By "length", do you mean body height? Because hair length is something that has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with the choices of the person (and that person's parents).

Not exactly true, each person has a length beyond which their hair will not grow, though it is easy enough to cut it shorter.

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We've got two competing perspectives here.  One angle is to look at the odds that somewhere out there, two people exist who look almost identical and were born within twenty minutes of each other, and yet are anything other than identical twins.  We just happen to be seeing them because, well, stories have to focus on someone unusual because not unusual is boring.  The other is the possibility that two girls who are closely related (half-sisters, cousins, etc) look very similar, and that perhaps the father had some influence on the time of birth -- some people really want their baby to be in the papers as the First Baby of the New Year, once they realize the "due date" is near there, and might even do what they can to try to make it happen.  Scheduled induction or Caesarian, herbs, exercise, even orgasm is supposed to have a chance of stimulating the start of labor.

I can kinda picture the guy, pretending to be squeamish and having to step out of the room his girlfirend is laboring in, only to go down the hall and around the corner to his wife's room in time to "get to the hospital just in time" to be there for the moment of their daughter's birth.  (I can come up with other scenarios, too.)  Depending on the size of the hospital and the busy-ness of the night, plus or minus privacy policies or how much the staff gossips, it might be possible to either keep staff from noticing or keep word from spreading too far about the guy whose wife and girlfriend were in labor at the same time.  Bribery could also be involved.

I suppose it's even possible that the girlfriend knew full well his wife was also pregnant, and made an effort to make things difficult for him by figuring out a way to get her own labor to overlap with the wife's, just to force him to choose.  (I say girlfriend because it seems likely the wife didn't find out about his cheating until Susan told her, but it's also possible that particular Other Woman was a this-is-your-last-chance type situation.)

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43 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Down to here
Down to there
Down to where
It stops by itself

Don't never need to cut it
'cause it stopped by itself!

12 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

We've got two competing perspectives here.

Or someone is covering up which is a much simpler explanation. Of course, simple isn't simple all that often in EGS.

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4 hours ago, mlooney said:

Don't make me post the video. Assume it's a quote from a 60's rock song...

Oh say, can you see...my eyes?  If you can, then my hair's too short.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg7i6XLBBZE

Very well, mlooney.  I won't make you post the video.

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18 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
On 09/10/2016 at 2:36 AM, hkmaly said:

Also, it's hard to have sex without erection.

Nonsense. Billions of women manage just fine without one.

... ok funny. I see I was not clear enough. I meant that it's hard to have the kind of sex which can result in pregnancy and is therefore most likely to be mentioned on sex education class without one of partners having erection.

(Not speaking about how many of those women prefer sex with erection, despite them not being the ones having it.)

But I must admit I never was on any sex education class. Maybe they have Kama Sutra as required reading and you need to repeat if you fail to describe at least 10 different sex positions on exams? That IS something which could make teenagers try more things than otherwise ...

6 hours ago, HarJIT said:

Indeed.  Different peoples' hairs grow to different lengths before the individual hairs are shed from the follicles in favour of growing new ones.  Although in practice, a lot of people have it cut to less than maximal length.

... but Susan actually have hair so long she may be near her maximum.

5 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

I can kinda picture the guy, pretending to be squeamish and having to step out of the room his girlfirend is laboring in, only to go down the hall and around the corner to his wife's room in time to "get to the hospital just in time" to be there for the moment of their daughter's birth.  (I can come up with other scenarios, too.)  Depending on the size of the hospital and the busy-ness of the night, plus or minus privacy policies or how much the staff gossips, it might be possible to either keep staff from noticing or keep word from spreading too far about the guy whose wife and girlfriend were in labor at the same time.  Bribery could also be involved.

I suppose it's even possible that the girlfriend knew full well his wife was also pregnant, and made an effort to make things difficult for him by figuring out a way to get her own labor to overlap with the wife's, just to force him to choose.  (I say girlfriend because it seems likely the wife didn't find out about his cheating until Susan told her, but it's also possible that particular Other Woman was a this-is-your-last-chance type situation.)

I can kinda picture the father to choose to ignore the girlfriend OR make some excuse allowing him to skip wife's birth, even arranging them being sent to different hospitals. Seems more likely than to try to be present on both births.

Note that we don't know if the woman Susan caught him with was Diane's mother, OR maybe she was Diane's mother but they broke due to him not being present at Diane's birth and only get together again years later (after a lot of flowers, apologies and "it will be different this time") ...

... would be funny if Susan's father actually only cheated TWICE, instead of being serial cheater like Edward implies. Would be even more funny if he managed to get Susan's another, younger, sister regardless.

 

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6 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

I can kinda picture the guy, pretending to be squeamish and having to step out of the room his girlfirend is laboring in, only to go down the hall and around the corner to his wife's room in time to "get to the hospital just in time" to be there for the moment of their daughter's birth.

This is pretty close to the big climax of a Blake Edwards movie from 1984, Micki and Maude

 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Would be even more funny if he managed to get Susan's another, younger, sister regardless.

Well, this is Sister III, after all.

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5 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

This is pretty close to the big climax of a Blake Edwards movie from 1984, Micki and Maude

Ah, I knew I had seen a movie like that somewhere (man with two women, both about to birth babies of whom he is the father, and both women unaware of the other), but I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of it.

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