A strange case of serendipity.

Sometimes life seems stranger than one understands.

A few days ago, someone I had not heard from in five years emailed me. We used to meet regularly but parted ways and just stopped meeting one day. Five long years passed and I never saw him once in all that time. I wrote back to reestablish contact and asked him how he had been and so on.

Then, two days later, I went to the East of Singapore to visit a new born child...a cousin to my boys. Upon leaving and going home, and passing through the MRT, a familiar face smiled at me.

"Hello Valentine!". It was the partner of the friend I had not seen for five years. Standing beside her was my old friend.

How odd. He had only just written to me two days before - and now I was meeting him by chance at an MRT station I never normally visited.

The meeting was a brief reintroduction flavoured by a mutual astonishment that we should meet by chance shortly after emailing.

Given this kind of occurrence, it is easy to think how some people might come to believe in "magical" explanations for things...but I prefer a more grounded term: serendipity - for was not the happy chance that we should meet so shortly after expressing a wish to, serendipitous? Yet, boy, did it feel strange.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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Luck of the Half-Irish

Sometimes, Ainan seems to be a lucky boy. Not lucky in the sense you might think - but in another sense altogether.

Today, Ainan was flipping a coin - just an average, real-life one dollar Singaporean coin. For those who don't know, this is a small, thick golden coloured coin, just over 2 centimetres in diameter.

He designated one side of the coin as "heads", the other as "tails". He flipped the coin. It came up heads. He flipped again. It came up heads. He flipped again. It came up heads. He flipped again. It came up heads. In fact, it came up heads eleven times in a row.

What are the chances of 11 heads in a row? Well, that is 2 to the power 11 or one in 2,048. Now, that seems pretty lucky - and not something you could repeat in a hurry. But then he went and tried again.

He flipped the coin. It came up heads. He flipped it again. It came up heads. In fact, he managed to get 20 heads in a row before it came up tails.

Now, that is really lucky. The chances of 20 heads in a row are one in 2 to the power 20, or one in 1,048,576. That is one in one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-six.

I really wish I could have videoed him doing it. Sadly, we have a Sony videocamera - which in my experience means a machine that doesn't work. We have repaired it three times since we bought it, at at least a couple of hundred dollars a time - and each time it has failed again. The last time it failed less than two weeks after "repair". So, the next camera we buy won't be a Sony. The Sony "videocamera" (for in reality it is actually an expensive paperweight), has been out of action for longer than it has actually worked.

So, perhaps if we had bought a more reliable brand, we would have been able to video Ainan's remarkable feat.

As it is, he is showing distinct signs of the Luck of the Irish, even if he is only half-Irish.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and one month, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and seven months, and Tiarnan, two years exactly, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

The tenth anniversary of a chance meeting

The month of November 2006 saw the 10th anniversary of the meeting of my wife-to-be, Syahidah Osman, in Brighton, England.

I had no notion that that chance meeting would lead, ten years later, to three sons, a house and a new life in a country I had never visited: Singapore. How odd the surprises of life are.

Happy Anniversary Syahidah.