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Comment by pmtarantino | Hacker News Reader

I am very sad for this (I am a huge Harry Potter fan), but I can not let pass a curiosity of which this event is part of.

Aaron Ramsey (Footballer player for Arsenal, UK) has a reputation for apparently killing off famous people when he scores. Whenever he scores someone famous tends to pass away, of course it is a big coincidence, but he did score yesterday too.

Also scored last week, and David Bowie passed away.

If you google it, he scored the previous day of the deaths of Colonel Gaddafi, Steve Jobs Osama Bin Laden and Whitney Houston, among others.

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http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

I didn't imply correlation, just curiosity.

Doesn't a "famous person" die almost every day?

Yes, but there is also a theory that celebs die in three's which is pretty interesting. A lot of researchers say this is because we as humans love patterns:

“Patterns in death, patterns in misfortune – those are things that help us try to understand the universe or reality in a way that makes sense of it,” explains John Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas who has written about the concept for Psychology Today. “In general, we’re very uncomfortable dealing with randomness.”

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/celebrities-dont-really-die-3s...

I recall seeing a suggestion that "everything" happens in threes, in a meaningful sense. Something along the lines of: you take events which happen according to a poisson distribution with parameter L, and you define a cluster to be "any group of events which happen with no more than time L between adjacent ones", and then the expected size of a cluster is a little less than three.

I'm probably misremembering the details, and I can't immediately find a source, but I thought this was interesting.

3 is the closest integer to e which plays a large part in randomness.

Then it seems pretty unethical to keep loving patterns so much. I'm going to start including as much anti-pattern in my coding as possible.

You know what is the funniest fact? There is Ramsey Theory stating chaos is impossible and you'll always find patterns even in the most unpredictable things. Now the footballer is called Ramsey as well... Another Ramsey Theory coincidence?

It's ridiculous that this is the top comment.

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