Hello all
Do we have any maths gods in the forum ? 

I brought my k in 1995 in Canberra it was a one owner Queensland bike so close to 1800km from home of the first owner

Dad brought his k a couple of months ago 2018 as the third owner from Melbourne first owner was a Queenslander so the bike is about 3000km from the first owner home 


Now what the chance that  the bike are in the same family brought 23 years apart and 3000km apart and have consecutive engine and frame numbers ?

Twilight Zone spooky!!!!

1. How many pre-1995 K bikes have been sold 2nd, 3rd or more hand in Australia? (You don’t say model or year.)
   
2. How many have been sold to a father/son combination? At what intervals?
   
3. How many consecutive frame numbers are still in existence, and presumably registered and on the road?
   

Those are just the first few of many questions that would need to be answered before a much better maths god that me could come up with an answer. 

I’m pretty confident that the probability would be even lower than the probability of someone like me getting two 1985 K100RTs a couple of years apart that came out of the factory on the same day, though about 45 apart in frame number. 

I’m also confident that the actual answer would be vanishingly small, though I don’t need to be a maths god for that conclusion. 

Bill
B.Sc 1977 (Maths, Physics)

wow !!!

Most intelligence, or knowledge/understanding, call it what you will, relies on our ability to identify and make links between entities: if you see an object that looks like a sabre tooth tiger it's probably going to try and eat you, standing inside a cave feels good when it rains etc.
It's the same reason why a dog barks when it hears a knock on the door - even if you're doing the knocking whilst he's watching you do it. He's made the link between 'knock' and 'visitor'. (Difference is that the dog doesn't have much of a brain when it comes to rationalising - working out what the knock sound actually is).
We are programmed, designed, to learn and advance; it's what humans do.
It follows that we are always on the lookout for more links to learn. Hence we have a tendency to notice a new link; we are hungry for this sort of stuff. Of all the thousands of things that we encounter during a day, we filter out the uninformative crap: you don't remember the colours of all the cars that passed you on the way to work, but heck, you'd never forget if all two hundred cars were blue.
That's all it is, sorry.

If you want to approach it from the statistical side, you have to have some discipline when it comes to defining your event.
If you spin a coin ninety nine times and it heads, what's the chance of the next spin being a head? - obviously fifty fifty.
On the other hand, if you spin a coin a hundred times, the probability of all heads is, tiny.

If you set out to buy two motorbikes, years apart etc.....the probability is tiny.

If you live your life always subconsciously on the lookout for this sort of thing, wherever it occurs....

How's this for a stat?

Strewth, too.

Years ago, whilst in uni, married with a new baby, our little fambly moved into an apartment nearby. The landlord, a bookshop owner, had just won 100,000 on the lotto. A coupla years later, we moved two towns over, closer to work. The upstairs landlord had just won 250,000 on the lotto. Three years later we bought our own house in another town. The next door neighbours won 500,000 on the lotto a month after we moved in. A decade later I took a new job. The boss shut down the business within a year because he won a coupla million on the lotto.

What is the obvious lesson here? Save my money, stop moving so bloody much, coz I'll never win the lotto!

The motto is; move into the house next door instead.

chris846 wrote:Most intelligence, or knowledge/understanding, call it what you will, relies on our ability to identify and make links between entities: if you see an object that looks like a sabre tooth tiger it's probably going to try and eat you, standing inside a cave feels good when it rains etc.
It's the same reason why a dog barks when it hears a knock on the door - even if you're doing the knocking whilst he's watching you do it. He's made the link between 'knock' and 'visitor'. (Difference is that the dog doesn't have much of a brain when it comes to rationalising - working out what the knock sound actually is).
We are programmed, designed, to learn and advance; it's what humans do.
It follows that we are always on the lookout for more links to learn. Hence we have a tendency to notice a new link; we are hungry for this sort of stuff. Of all the thousands of things that we encounter during a day, we filter out the uninformative crap: you don't remember the colours of all the cars that passed you on the way to work, but heck, you'd never forget if all two hundred cars were blue.
That's all it is, sorry.

The human mind also has a tendency to want to put things in order somehow and see patterns where there are none.  For example, when you look at a cloud formation you may see a house, a car, whatever and say "Look, that cloud is shaped like a house."  Logically we know that a cloud formation has absolutely nothing to do with a human built wooden structure but our mind uses the similarity to make a connection and "make sense" of things.

This human trait is how some people can easily get lured into buying into conspiracy theories and associating coincidence with correlation or, worse yet, causation.

As for two bikes that have one-off serial numbers meeting up again, that'd be just dumb luck.  Although I think the chances of that occurring in Australia are  probably greater than of that happening in a larger country

And you have to admit that only a very very strange creature would make a motorcycle out of a Peugeot engine.  


No rational logic there. Purely a random event.