02 SEPTEMBER 2002: A "PEACE CONDUIT" FOR THE DEAD SEA.
from msnbc:
 

A plan to save the Dead Sea
Israel, Jordan announce $800 million joint effort
 

      JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Sept. 1 —  Israel and Jordan announced their largest joint project ever, a $800 million pipeline intended to save the shrinking Dead Sea from environmental devastation.
      THE LEVEL OF THE SEA, shared between the two countries that signed a peace agreement in 1994, is sinking at the rate of nearly a yard a year and could disappear in a few decades, damaging tourism in both countries and indirectly draining scarce water supplies in the region, Cabinet ministers from both countries said Sunday at the World Summit.
       “It’s a catastrophe under way and it might be apocalyptic if we don’t challenge it as fast as we can,” Israeli Environment Minister Tzahi Hanegbi said.
       The two governments said Sunday they hoped to work together to build a 190-mile-long pipeline from the Red Sea through both countries to halt the decrease in water level in the Dead Sea.
       Israel and Jordan had hopes of close cooperation after signing a peace accord eight years ago. However, those plans never lived up to expectations and ties between the two have cooled since the second Palestinian intefadeh began two years ago.
       “This sends a message that we do live in one area with a common destiny. The environment, ecology and nature know no boundaries and no political conflicts,” said Bassem Awadallah, Jordan’s minister of planning.
          The Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth at 400 yards below sea level, is the saltiest large body of water in the world. It holds ancient sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It also houses a unique ecosystem, with leopards, ibexes and several threatened birds. Its unique minerals are used for health treatments, its potash fuels a major chemical industry and its beauty attracts thousands of tourists.
       But the sea has been shrinking for decades because much of the water from the Jordan River, which ends in the Dead Sea, has been diverted for use in the region.
       The increasingly thirsty sea basin has begun sucking up vital sources of fresh groundwater, causing massive sinkholes to appear on both sides of the border. Jordanian officials said they had to evacuate 3,000 people because of the sinkholes.
       The pipeline — which officials have nicknamed the “peace conduit” — would end the Dead Sea’s decline and slowly restore it to an ecologically appropriate level, officials said.
          The country’s hope to complete preliminary plans this month and start a nine-month study of the project while both governments appeal for international donor assistance to fund it. The project itself will take three to five years to complete, officials said.
       Both countries hope the pipeline will be the seed of a far more ambitious plan to build a canal and a desalination plant that will provide fresh water for Jordanians, Israelis and Palestinians. That project, which would cost an estimated $3 billion, would take more than a decade to finish, Awadallah said.
       Officials from both sides expressed hope that eventually the Palestinians could be brought into the deal as partners to share the water resources and protect the environment they all share.
       “The quicker we end the occupation of the Palestinian areas, the quicker we reach a peace settlement that will guarantee justice for the Palestinians and security for the Israelis ... the quicker we will all turn our attention, our resources, our time and effort toward construction and not destruction,” Awadallah said.

From 11 August 2002 New York Times Sunday Magazine:

The Odds of That
By LISA BELKIN

When the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side
street, near the empty spot where he had habitually parked his Ford Explorer. At
about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a white
rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of Memphis, where he
had just had a jovial dinner with friends. The following week, Vladimir
Pasechnik collapsed in London, apparently of a stroke.

The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four nerve-jangling
months. Stabbed in Leesburg, Va. Suffocated in an air-locked lab in Geelong,
Australia. Found wedged under a chair, naked from the waist down, in a
blood-splattered apartment in Norwich, England. Hit by a car while jogging.
Killed in a private plane crash. Shot dead while a pizza delivery man served as
a decoy.

What joined these men was their proximity to the world of bioterror and germ
warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked, was a researcher at the University of
Miami School of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as anyone about
how the immune system responds to attacks from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was
Russian, and before he defected, he helped the Soviets transform cruise missiles
into biological weapons. The chain of deaths -- these three men and eight others
like them -- began last fall, back when emergency teams in moonsuits were
scouring the Capitol, when postal workers were dying, when news agencies were on
high alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its mail.

In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths might not have been noticed, but
these are not ordinary times. Neighbors report neighbors to the F.B.I.;
passengers are escorted off planes because they make other passengers nervous;
medical journals debate what to publish, for fear the articles will be read by
evil eyes. Now we are spooked and startled by stories like these -- all these
scientists dying within months of one another, at the precise moment when tiny
organisms loom as a gargantuan threat. The stories of these dozen or so deaths
started out as a curiosity and were transformed rumor by rumor into the specter
of conspiracy as they circulated first on the Internet and then in the
mainstream media. What are the odds, after all?

What are the odds, indeed?

For this is not about conspiracy but about coincidence -- unexpected connections
that are both riveting and rattling. Much religious faith is based on the idea
that almost nothing is coincidence; science is an exercise in eliminating the
taint of coincidence; police work is often a feint and parry between those
trying to prove coincidence and those trying to prove complicity. Without
coincidence, there would be few movies worth watching (''Of all the gin joints
in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine''), and literary plots
would come grinding to a disappointing halt. (What if Oedipus had not happened
to marry his mother? If Javert had not happened to arrive in the town where
Valjean was mayor?)

The true meaning of the word is ''a surprising concurrence of events, perceived
as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.'' In other words,
pure happenstance. Yet by merely noticing a coincidence, we elevate it to
something that transcends its definition as pure chance. We are discomforted by
the idea of a random universe. Like Mel Gibson's character Graham Hess in M.
Night Shyamalan's new movie ''Signs,'' we want to feel that our lives are
governed by a grand plan.

The need is especially strong in an age when paranoia runs rampant.
''Coincidence feels like a loss of control perhaps,'' says John Allen Paulos, a
professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of ''Innumeracy,''
the improbable best seller about how Americans don't understand numbers. Finding
a reason or a pattern where none actually exists ''makes it less frightening,''
he says, because events get placed in the realm of the logical. ''Believing in
fate, or even conspiracy, can sometimes be more comforting than facing the fact
that sometimes things just happen.''

In the past year there has been plenty of conspiracy, of course, but also a lot
of things have ''just happened.'' And while our leaders are out there warning us
to be vigilant, the statisticians are out there warning that patterns are not
always what they seem. We need to be reminded, Paulos and others say, that most
of the time patterns that seem stunning to us aren't even there. For instance,
although the numbers 9/11 (9 plus 1 plus 1) equal 11, and American Airlines
Flight 11 was the first to hit the twin towers, and there were 92 people on
board (9 plus 2), and Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year (2 plus 5 plus 4),
and there are 11 letters each in ''Afghanistan,'' ''New York City'' and ''the
Pentagon'' (and while we're counting, in George W. Bush), and the World Trade
towers themselves took the form of the number 11, this seeming numerical message
is not actually a pattern that exists but merely a pattern we have found. (After
all, the second flight to hit the towers was United Airlines Flight 175, and the
one that hit the Pentagon was American Airlines Flight 77, and the one that
crashed in a Pennsylvania field was United Flight 93, and the Pentagon is
shaped, well, like a pentagon.)

The same goes for the way we think of miraculous intervention. We need to be
told that those lucky last-minute stops for an Egg McMuffin at McDonald's or to
pick up a watch at the repair shop or to vote in the mayoral primary -- stops
that saved lives of people who would otherwise have been in the towers when the
first plane hit -- certainly looked like miracles but could have been predicted
by statistics. So, too, can the most breathtaking of happenings -- like the
sparrow that happened to appear at one memorial service just as a teenage boy,
at the lectern eulogizing his mom, said the word ''mother.'' The tiny bird
lighted on the boy's head; then he took it in his hand and set it free.

Something like that has to be more than coincidence, we protest. What are the
odds? The mathematician will answer that even in the most unbelievable
situations, the odds are actually very good. The law of large numbers says that
with a large enough denominator -- in other words, in a big wide world -- stuff
will happen, even very weird stuff. ''The really unusual day would be one where
nothing unusual happens,'' explains Persi Diaconis, a Stanford statistician who
has spent his career collecting and studying examples of coincidence. Given that
there are 280 million people in the United States, he says, ''280 times a day, a
one-in-a-million shot is going to occur.''

Throw your best story at him -- the one about running into your childhood
playmate on a street corner in Azerbaijan or marrying a woman who has a
birthmark shaped like a shooting star that is a perfect match for your own or
dreaming that your great-aunt Lucy would break her collarbone hours before she
actually does -- and he will nod politely and answer that such things happen all
the time. In fact, he and his colleagues also warn me that although I pulled all
examples in the prior sentence from thin air, I will probably get letters from
readers saying one of those things actually happened to them.

And what of the deaths of nearly a dozen scientists? Is it really possible that
they all just happened to die, most in such peculiar, jarring ways, within so
short a time? ''We can never say for a fact that something isn't a conspiracy,''
says Bradley Efron, a professor of statistics at Stanford. ''We can just point
out the odds that it isn't.''
 

I first found myself wondering about coincidence last spring when I read a small
news item out of the tiny Finnish town of Raahe, which is 370 miles north of
Helsinki. On the morning of March 5, two elderly twin brothers were riding their
bicycles, as was their habit, completing their separate errands. At 9:30, one
brother was struck by a truck along coastal Highway 8 and killed instantly.
About two hours later and one mile down the same highway, the other brother was
struck by a second truck and killed.

''It was hard to believe this could happen just by chance,'' says Marko Salo,
the senior constable who investigated both deaths for the Raahe Police
Department. Instead, the department looked for a cause, thinking initially that
the second death was really a suicide.

''Almost all Raahe thought he did it knowing that his brother was dead,'' Salo
says of the second brother's death. ''They thought he tried on purpose. That
would have explained things.'' But the investigation showed that the older
brother was off cheerfully getting his hair cut just before his own death.

The family could not immediately accept that this was random coincidence,
either. ''It was their destiny,'' offers their nephew, who spoke with me on
behalf of the family. It is his opinion that his uncles shared a psychic bond
throughout their lives. When one brother became ill, the other one fell ill
shortly thereafter. When one reached to scratch his nose, the other would often
do the same. Several years ago, one brother was hit and injured by a car (also
while biking), and the other one developed pain in the same leg.

The men's sister had still another theory entirely. ''She worried that it was a
plot to kill both of them,'' the nephew says, describing his aunt's concerns
that terrorists might have made their way to Raahe. ''She was angry. She wanted
to blame someone. So she said the chances of this happening by accident are
impossible.''

Not true, the statisticians say. But before we can see the likelihood for what
it is, we have to eliminate the distracting details. We are far too taken, Efron
says, with superfluous facts and findings that have no bearing on the statistics
of coincidence. After our initial surprise, Efron says that the real yardstick
for measuring probability is ''How surprised should we be?'' How surprising is
it, to use this example, that two 70-year-old men in the same town should die
within two hours of each other? Certainly not common, but not unimaginable. But
the fact that they were brothers would seem to make the odds more astronomical.
This, however, is a superfluous fact. What is significant in their case is that
two older men were riding bicycles along a busy highway in a snowstorm, which
greatly increases the probability that they would be hit by trucks.

Statisticians like Efron emphasize that when something striking happens, it only
incidentally happens to us. When the numbers are large enough, and the
distracting details are removed, the chance of anything is fairly high. Imagine
a meadow, he says, and then imagine placing your finger on a blade of grass. The
chance of choosing exactly that blade of grass would be one in a million or even
higher, but because it is a certainty that you will choose a blade of grass, the
odds of one particular one being chosen are no more or less than the one to
either side.

Robert J. Tibshirani, a statistician at Stanford University who proved that it
was probably not coincidence that accident rates increase when people
simultaneously drive and talk on a cellphone, leading some states to ban the
practice, uses the example of a hand of poker. ''The chance of getting a royal
flush is very low,'' he says, ''and if you were to get a royal flush, you would
be surprised. But the chance of any hand in poker is low. You just don't notice
when you get all the others; you notice when you get the royal flush.''

When these professors talk, they do so slowly, aware that what they are saying
is deeply counterintuitive. No sooner have they finished explaining that the
world is huge and that any number of unlikely things are likely to happen than
they shift gears and explain that the world is also quite small, which explains
an entire other type of coincidence. One relatively simple example of this is
''the birthday problem.'' There are as many as 366 days in a year (accounting
for leap years), and so you would have to assemble 367 people in a room to
absolutely guarantee that two of them have the same birthday. But how many
people would you need in that room to guarantee a 50 percent chance of at least
one birthday match?

Intuitively, you assume that the answer should be a relatively large number. And
in fact, most people's first guess is 183, half of 366. But the actual answer is
23. In Paulos's book, he explains the math this way: ''[T]he number of ways in
which five dates can be chosen (allowing for repetitions) is (365 x 365 x 365 x
365 x 365). Of all these 3655 ways, however, only (365 x 364 x 363 x 362 x 361)
are such that no two of the dates are the same; any of the 365 days can be
chosen first, any of the remaining 364 can be chosen second and so on. Thus, by
dividing this latter product (365 x 364 x 363 x 362 x 361) by 3655, we get the
probability that five persons chosen at random will have no birthday in common.
Now, if we subtract this probability from 1 (or from 100 percent if we're
dealing with percentages), we get the complementary probability that at least
two of the five people do have a birthday in common. A similar calculation using
23 rather than 5 yields 1/2, or 50 percent, as the probability that at least 2
of 23 people will have a common birthday.''

Got that?

Using similar math, you can calculate that if you want even odds of finding two
people born within one day of each other, you only need 14 people, and if you
are looking for birthdays a week apart, the magic number is seven.
(Incidentally, if you are looking for an even chance that someone in the room
will have your exact birthday, you will need 253 people.) And yet despite
numbers like these, we are constantly surprised when we meet a stranger with
whom we share a birth date or a hometown or a middle name. We are amazed by the
overlap -- and we conveniently ignore the countless things we do not have in
common.
 

Which brings us to the death of Benito Que, who was not, despite reports to the
contrary, actually a microbiologist. He was a researcher in a lab at the
University of Miami Sylvester Cancer Center, where he was testing various agents
as potential cancer drugs. He never worked with anthrax or any infectious
disease, according to Dr. Bach Ardalan, a professor of medicine at the
University of Miami and Que's boss for the past three years. ''There is no truth
to the talk that Benito was doing anything related to microbiology,'' Ardalan
says. ''He certainly wasn't doing any sensitive kind of work that anyone would
want to hurt him for.''

But those facts got lost amid the confusion -- and the prevalence of very
distracting details -- in the days after he died. So did the fact that he had
hypertension. On the afternoon of Monday, Nov. 19, Que attended a late-afternoon
lab meeting, and as it ended, he mentioned that he hadn't been feeling well. A
nurse took Que's blood pressure, which was 190/110. ''I wanted to admit him'' to
the hospital, Ardalan says, but Que insisted on going home.

Que had the habit of parking his car on Northwest 10th Avenue, a side street
that Ardalan describes as being ''beyond the area considered to be safe.'' His
spot that day was in front of a house where a young boy was playing outside.
Four youths approached Que as he neared his car, the boy later told the police,
and there might have been some baseball bats involved. When the police arrived,
they found Que unconscious. His briefcase was at his side, but his wallet was
gone. His car was eventually found abandoned several miles from the scene. He
was taken to the hospital, the same one at which he worked, where he spent more
than a week in a coma before dying without ever regaining consciousness.

The mystery, limited to small items in local Florida papers at first, was ''What
killed Benito Que?'' Could it have been the mugging? A CAT scan showed no signs
of bony fracture. In fact, there were no scrapes or bruises or other physical
signs of assault. Perhaps he died of a stroke? His brain scan did show a ''huge
intracranial bleed,'' Ardalan says, which would have explained his earlier
headache, and his high blood pressure would have made a stroke likely.

In other words, this man just happened to be mugged when he was a stroke waiting
to be triggered. That is a jarring coincidence, to be sure. But it is not one
that the world was likely to have noticed if Don Wiley had not up and
disappeared.

on C. Wiley was a microbiologist. He did some work with anthrax, and a lot of
work with H.I.V., and he was also quite familiar with Ebola, smallpox, herpes
and influenza. At 57, he was the father of four children and a professor of
biochemistry and biophysics in the department of molecular and cellular biology
at Harvard.

On Nov. 15, four days before the attack on Benito Que, Wiley was in Memphis to
visit his father and to attend the annual meeting of the scientific advisory
board of St. Jude's Research Hospital, of which he was a member. At midnight, he
was seen leaving a banquet at the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. Friends and
colleagues say he had a little to drink but did not appear impaired, and they
remember him as being in a fine mood, looking forward to seeing his wife and
children, who were about to join him for a short vacation.

Wiley's father lives in a Memphis suburb, and that is where Wiley should have
been headed after the banquet. Instead, his car was found facing in the opposite
direction on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River at
the border of Tennessee and Arkansas. When the police found the car at 4 a.m.,
it was unlocked, the keys were in the ignition and the gas tank was full. There
was a scrape of yellow paint on the driver's side, which appeared to come from a
construction sign on the bridge, and a right hubcap was missing on the passenger
side, where the wheel rims were also scraped. There was no sign, however, of Don
Wiley.

The police trawled the muddy Mississippi, but they didn't really expect to find
him. Currents run fast at that part of the river, and a body would be quickly
swept away. At the start of the search, they thought he might have committed
suicide; others had jumped from the DeSoto Bridge over the years. Detectives
searched Wiley's financial records, his family relationships, his scientific
research -- anything for a hint that the man might have had cause to take his
own life.

Finding nothing, the investigation turned medical. Wiley, they learned, had a
seizure disorder that he had hidden from all but family and close friends. He
had a history of two or three major episodes a year, his wife told
investigators, and the condition was made worse when he was under stress or the
influence of alcohol. Had Wiley, who could well have been tired, disoriented by
bridge construction and under the influence of a few drinks, had a seizure that
sent him over the side of the bridge?

That was the theory the police spoke of in public, but they were also
considering something else. The week that Wiley disappeared coincided with the
peak of anthrax fear throughout the country. Tainted letters appeared the month
before at the Senate and the House of Representatives. Two weeks earlier, a New
York City hospital worker died of inhaled anthrax. Memphis was not untouched by
the scare; a federal judge and two area congressmen each received hoax letters.
Could it be mere chance that this particular scientist, who had profound
knowledge of these microbes, had disappeared at this time?

''The circumstances were peculiar,'' says George Bolds, a spokesman for the
Memphis bureau of the F.B.I., which was called in to assist. ''There were
questions that had to be asked. Could he have been kidnapped because his
scientific abilities would have made him capable of creating anthrax? Or maybe
he'd had some involvement in the mailing of the anthrax, and he'd disappeared to
cover his tracks? Did his co-conspirators grab him and kill him?

''We were in new territory,'' Bolds continued. ''Just because something is
conceivable doesn't mean it's actually happened, but at the same time, just
because it's never happened before doesn't mean it can't happen. People's ideas
of what is possible definitely changed on Sept. 11. People feel less secure and
less safe. I'm not sure that they're at greater risk than they were before.
Maybe they're just more aware of the risk they are actually at.''

As a species, we appear to be biologically programmed to see patterns and
conspiracies, and this tendency increases when we sense that we're in danger.
''We are hard-wired to overreact to coincidences,'' says Persi Diaconis. ''It
goes back to primitive man. You look in the bush, it looks like stripes, you'd
better get out of there before you determine the odds that you're looking at a
tiger. The cost of being flattened by the tiger is high. Right now, people are
noticing any kind of odd behavior and being nervous about it.''

Adds John Allen Paulos: ''Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It might
just be part of our biology that conspires to make coincidences more meaningful
than they really are. Look at the natural world of rocks and plants and rivers:
it doesn't offer much evidence for superfluous coincidences, but primitive man
had to be alert to all anomalies and respond to them as if they were real.''

For decades, all academic talk of coincidence has been in the context of the
mathematical. New work by scientists like Joshua B. Tenenbaum, an assistant
professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T., is
bringing coincidence into the realm of human cognition. Finding connections is
not only the way we react to the extraordinary, Tenenbaum postulates, but also
the way we make sense of our ordinary world. ''Coincidences are a window into
how we learn about things,'' he says. ''They show us how minds derive richly
textured knowledge from limited situations.''

To put it another way, our reaction to coincidence shows how our brains fill in
the factual blanks. In an optical illusion, he explains, our brain fills the
gaps, and although people take it for granted that seeing is believing, optical
illusions prove that's not true. ''Illusions also prove that our brain is
capable of imposing structure on the world,'' he says. ''One of the things our
brain is designed to do is infer the causal structure of the world from limited
information.''

If not for this ability, he says, a child could not learn to speak. A child sees
a conspiracy, he says, in that others around him are obviously communicating and
it is up to the child to decode the method. But these same mechanisms can
misfire, he warns. They were well suited to a time of cavemen and tigers and can
be overloaded in our highly complex world. ''It's why we have the urge to work
everything into one big grand scheme,'' he says. ''We do like to weave things
together.

''But have we evolved into fundamentally rational or fundamentally irrational
creatures? That is one of the central questions.''
 

We pride ourselves on being independent and original, and yet our reactions to
nearly everything can be plotted along a predictable spectrum. When the grid is
coincidences, one end of the scale is for those who believe that these are
entertaining events with no meaning; at the other end are those who believe that
coincidence is never an accident.

The view of coincidence as fate has lately become something of a minitrend in
the New Age section of bookstores. Among the more popular authors is SQuire
Rushnell (who, in the interest of marketing, spells his first name with a
capital Q). Rushnell spent 20 years producing such television programs as ''Good
Morning America'' and ''Schoolhouse Rock.'' His fascination with coincidence
began when he learned that both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same
July 4, 50 years after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence.

''That stuck in my craw,'' Rushnell says, ''and I couldn't stop wondering what
that means.'' And so Rushnell wrote ''When God Winks: How the Power of
Coincidence Guides Your Life.'' The book was published by a small press shortly
before Sept. 11 and sold well without much publicity. It will be rereleased with
great fanfare by Simon & Schuster next month. Its message, Rushnell says, is
that ''coincidences are signposts along your universal pathway. They are hints
that you are going in the right direction or that you should change course. It's
like your grandmother sitting across the Thanksgiving table from you and giving
you a wink. What does that wink mean? 'I'm here, I love you, stay the course.'''

During my interview with Rushnell, I told him the following story: On a frigid
December night many years ago, a friend dragged me out of my warm apartment,
where I planned to spend the evening in my bathrobe nursing a cold. I had to
come with her to the movies, she said, because she had made plans with a pal
from her office, and he was bringing a friend for me to meet. Translation: I was
expected to show up for a last-minute blind date. For some reason, I agreed to
go, knocking back a decongestant as I left home. We arrived at the theater to
find that the friend who was supposed to be my ''date'' had canceled, but not to
worry, another friend had been corralled as a replacement. The replacement and I
both fell asleep in the movie (I was sedated by cold medicine; he was a medical
resident who had been awake for 36 hours), but four months later we were
engaged, and we have been married for nearly 15 years.

Rushnell was enthralled by this tale, particularly by the mystical force that
seemed to have nudged me out the door when I really wanted to stay home and
watch ''The Golden Girls.'' I know that those on the other end of the spectrum
-- the scientists and mathematicians -- would have offered several overlapping
explanations of why it was unremarkable.

There are, of course, the laws of big numbers and small numbers -- the fact that
the world is simultaneously so large that anything can happen and so small that
weird things seem to happen all the time. Add to that the work of the late Amos
Tversky, a giant in the field of coincidence theory, who once described his role
in this world as ''debugging human intuition.'' Among other things, Tversky
disproved the ''hot hand'' theory of basketball, the belief that a player who
has made his last few baskets will more likely than not make his next. After
examining thousands of shots by the Philadelphia 76ers, he proved that the odds
of a successful shot cannot be predicted by the shots that came before.

Tversky similarly proved that arthritis sufferers cannot actually predict the
weather and are not in more pain when there's a storm brewing, a belief that
began with the ancient Greeks. He followed 18 patients for 15 months, keeping
detailed records of their reports of pain and joint swelling and matching them
with constantly updated weather reports. There was no pattern, he concluded,
though he also conceded that his data would not change many people's beliefs.

We believe in such things as hot hands and arthritic forecasting and predestined
blind dates because we notice only the winning streaks, only the chance meetings
that lead to romance, only the days that Grandma's hands ache before it rains.
''We forget all the times that nothing happens,'' says Ruma Falk, a professor
emeritus of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who studied years
ago with Tversky. ''Dreams are another example,'' Falk says. ''We dream a lot.
Every night and every morning. But it sometimes happens that the next day
something reminds you of that dream. Then you think it was a premonition.''

Falk's work is focused on the question of why we are so entranced by coincidence
in the first place. Her research itself began with a coincidence. She was on
sabbatical in New York from her native Israel, and on the night before Rosh
Hashana she happened to meet a friend from Jerusalem on a Manhattan street
corner. She and the friend stood on that corner and marveled at the coincidence.
What is the probability of this happening? she remembers wondering. What did
this mean?

''How stupid we were,'' Falk says now, ''to be so surprised. We related to all
the details that had converged to create that moment. But the real question was
what was the probability that at some time in some place I would meet one of my
circle of friends? And when I told this story to others at work, they encoded
the events as two Israelis meeting in New York, something that happens all the
time.''

Why was her experience so resonant for her, Falk asked herself, but not for
those around her? One of the many experiments she has conducted since then
proceeded as follows: she visited several large university classes, with a total
of 200 students, and asked each student to write his or her birth date on a
card. She then quietly sorted the cards and found the handful of birthdays that
students had in common. Falk wrote those dates on the blackboard. April 10, for
instance, Nov. 8, Dec. 16. She then handed out a second card and asked all the
students to use a scale to rate how surprised they were by these coincidences.

The cards were numbered, so Falk could determine which answers came from
respondents who found their own birth date written on the board. Those in that
subgroup were consistently more surprised by the coincidence than the rest of
the students. ''It shows the stupid power of personal involvement,'' Falk says.

The more personal the event, the more meaning we give it, which is why I am
quite taken with my story of meeting my husband (because it is a pivotal moment
in my life), and why SQuire Rushnell is also taken with it (because it fits into
the theme of his book), but also why Falk is not impressed at all. She likes her
own story of the chance meeting on a corner better than my story, while I think
her story is a yawn.

The fact that personal attachment adds significance to an event is the reason we
tend to react so strongly to the coincidences surrounding Sept. 11. In a deep
and lasting way, that tragedy feels as if it happened to us all.

Falk's findings also shed light on the countless times that pockets of the
general public find themselves at odds with authorities and statisticians. Her
results might explain, for instance, why lupus patients are certain their breast
implants are the reason for their illness, despite the fact that epidemiologists
conclude there is no link, or why parents of autistic children are resolute in
their belief that childhood immunizations or environmental toxins or a host of
other suspected pathogens are the cause, even though experts are skeptical. They
might also explain the outrage of all the patients who are certain they live in
a cancer cluster, but who have been told otherwise by researchers.

Let's be clear: this does not mean that conspiracies do not sometimes exist or
that the environment never causes clusters of death. And just as statistics are often
used to show us that we should not be surprised, they can also prove what we
suspect, that something is wrong out there.

''The fact that so many suspected cancer clusters have turned out to be
statistically insupportable does not mean the energy we spent looking for them
has been wasted,'' says Dr. James M. Robins, a professor of epidemiology and
biostatistics at Harvard and an expert on cancer clusters. ''You're never going
to find the real ones if you don't look at all the ones that don't turn out to
be real ones.''

Most often, though, coincidence is a sort of Rorschach test. We look into it and
find what we already believe. ''It's like an archer shooting an arrow and then
drawing a circle around it,'' Falk says. ''We give it meaning because it does
mean something -- to us.''

Vladimir Pasechnik was 64 when he died. His early career was spent in the Soviet
Union working at Biopreparat, the site of that country's biological weapons
program. He defected in 1989 and spilled what he knew to the British, revealing
for the first time the immense scale of Soviet work with anthrax, plague,
tularemia and smallpox.

For the next 10 years, he worked at the Center for Applied Microbiology and
Research, part of Britain's Department of Health. Two years ago, he left to form
Regma Biotechnologies, whose goal was to develop treatment for tuberculosis and
other infectious disease. In the weeks before he died, Pasechnik had reportedly
consulted with authorities about the growing anthrax scare. Despite all these
intriguing details, there is nothing to suggest that his death was caused by
anything other than a stroke.

Robert Schwartz's death, while far more dramatic and bizarre, also appears to
have nothing to do with the fact that he was an expert on DNA sequencing and
analysis. On Dec. 10 he was found dead on the kitchen floor of his isolated
log-and-fieldstone farmhouse near Leesburg, Va., where he had lived alone since
losing his wife to cancer four years ago and his children to college. Schwartz
had been stabbed to death with a two-foot-long sword, and his killer had carved
an X on the back of his neck.

Three friends of Schwartz's college-age daughter were soon arrested for what the
prosecutor called a ''planned assassination''; two of the trials for
first-degree murder are scheduled for this month. A few weeks later, police
arrested the daughter as well. One suspect has a history of mental illness, and
their written statements to police talk of devil worship and revenge. There is
no talk, however, of microbiology.

On the same day that Schwartz died, Set Van Nguyen, 44, was found dead in an
air-locked storage chamber at the Australian Commonwealth's Scientific and
Industrial Research Organization's animal diseases facility in Geelong. A
months-long internal investigation concluded that a string of equipment failures
had allowed nitrogen to build up in the room, causing Nguyen to suffocate.
Although the center itself dealt with microbes like mousepox, which is similar
to smallpox, Nguyen himself did not. ''Nguyen was in no way involved in research
into mousepox,'' says Stephen Prowse, who was the acting director of the
Australian lab during the investigation. ''He was a valued member of the
laboratory's technical support staff and not a research scientist.''

Word of all these deaths (though not the specific details) found its way to Ian
Gurney, a British writer. Gurney is the author of ''The Cassandra Prophecy:
Armageddon Approaches,'' a book that uses clues from the Bible to calculate that
Judgment Day will occur in or about the year 2023. He is currently researching
his second book, which is in part about the threat of nuclear and biological
weapons, and after Sept. 11 he entered a news alert request into Yahoo, asking
to be notified whenever there was news with the key word ''microbiologist.''

First Que, then Wiley, then Pasechnik, Schwartz and Nguyen popped up on Gurney's
computer. ''I'm not a conspiracy theorist,'' says the man who has predicted the
end of the world, ''but it certainly did look suspicious.'' Gurney compiled what
he had learned from these scattered accounts into an article that
he sent to a number of Web sites, including Rense.com, which tracks U.F.O.
sightings worldwide. ''Over the past few weeks,'' Gurney wrote, ''several
world-acclaimed scientific researchers specializing in infectious diseases and
biological agents such as anthrax, as well as DNA sequencing, have been found
dead or have gone missing.''

The article went on to call Benito Que, the cancer lab technician, ''a cell
biologist working on infectious diseases like H.I.V.,'' and said that he had
been attacked by four men with a baseball bat but did not mention that he
suffered from high blood pressure. It then described the disappearance of Wiley
without mentioning his seizure disorder and the death of Pasechnik without
saying that he had suffered a stroke. It gave the grisly details of Schwartz's
murder, but said nothing of the arrests of his daughter's friends. Nguyen, in
turn, was described as ''a skilled microbiologist,'' and it was noted that he
shared a last name with Kathy Nguyen, the 61-year-old hospital worker who just
happened to be the one New Yorker to die of anthrax.

Of course, there have always been rumors based on skewed historical fact.
Recall, for example, the list of coincidences that supposedly linked the deaths
of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. It goes, in part, like this: The two men were
elected 100 years apart; their assassins were born 100 years apart (in fact, 101
years apart); they were both succeeded by men named Johnson; and the two
Johnsons were born 100 years apart. Their names each contain seven letters;
their successors' names each contain 13 letters; and their assassins' names each
contain 15 letters. Lincoln was shot in a theater and his assassin ran to a
warehouse, while Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin ran to a
theater. Lincoln, or so the story goes, had a secretary named Kennedy who warned
him not to go to the theater the night he was killed (for the record, Lincoln's
White House secretaries were named John Nicolay and John Hay, and Lincoln
regularly rejected warnings not to attend public events out of fear for his
safety, including his own inauguration); Kennedy, in turn, had a secretary named
Lincoln (true, Evelyn Lincoln) who warned him not to go to Dallas (he, too, was
regularly warned not to go places, including San Antonio the day before his trip
to Dallas).

I first read about these connections five years after the Kennedy assassination,
when I was 8, which says something about how conspiracy theory speaks to the
child in all of us. But it also says something about the technology of the time.
The numerological coincidences from the World Trade Center that I mentioned at
the start of this article made their way onto my computer screen by Sept. 15,
from a friend of a friend of a friend of an acquaintance, ad infinitum and ad
nauseam.

Professor Robins of Harvard points out that ''the Web has changed the scale of
these things.'' Had there been a string of dead scientists back in 1992 rather
than 2002, he says, it is possible that no one would have ever known. ''Back
then, you would not have had the technical ability to gather all these bits and
pieces of information, while today you'd be able to pull it off. It's well known
that if you take a lot of random noise, you can find chance patterns in it, and
the Net makes it easier to collect random noise.''

The Gurney article traveled from one Web site to the next and caught the
attention of Paul Sieveking, a co-editor of Fortean Times, a magazine that
describes itself as ''the Journal of Strange Phenomena.''

''People send me stuff all the time,'' Sieveking says. ''This was really
interesting.'' Wearing his second hat as a columnist for the The Sunday
Telegraph in London, he wrote a column on the subject for that paper titled
''Strange but True -- The Deadly Curse of the Bioresearchers.'' His version
began with the link between the two Nguyens and concluded, ''It is possible that
nothing connects this string of events, but . . . it offers ample fodder for the
conspiracy theorist or thriller writer.''

Commenting on the story months later, Sieveking says: ''It's probably just a
random clumping, but it just happens to look significant. We're all natural
storytellers, and conspiracy theorists are just frustrated novelists. We like to
make up a good story out of random facts.''

Over the months, Gurney added names to his list and continued to send it to
virtual and actual publications around the U.S. Mainstream newspapers started
taking up the story, including an alternative weekly in Memphis, where interest
in the Wiley case was particularly strong, and most recently The Toronto Globe
and Mail. The tally of ''microbiologists'' is now at 11, give or take, depending
on the story you read. In addition to the men already discussed, the names that
appear most often are these: Victor Korshunov, a Russian expert in intestinal
bacteria, who was bashed over the head near his home in Moscow; Ian Langford, a
British expert in environmental risk and disease, who was found dead in his home
near Norwich, England, naked from the waist down and wedged under a chair; Tanya
Holzmayer, who worked as a microbiologist near San Jose and was shot seven times
by a former colleague when she opened the door to a pizza delivery man; David
Wynn-Williams, who studied microbes in the Antarctic and was hit by a car while
jogging near his home in Cambridge, England; and Steven Mostow, an expert in
influenza, who died when the plane he was piloting crashed near Denver.

The stories have also made their way into the e-mail in-boxes of countless
microbiologists. Janet Shoemaker, director of public and scientific affairs for
the American Society for Microbiology, heard the tales and points out that her
organization alone has 41,000 members, meaning that the deaths of 11 worldwide,
most of whom were not technically microbiologists at all, is not statistically
surprising. ''We're saddened by anyone's death,'' she says. ''But this is just a
coincidence. In another political climate I don't think anyone would have
noticed.''

Ken Alibek heard them, too, and dismissed them. Alibek is one of the country's
best-known microbiologists. He was the No. 2 man at Biopreparrat (where Victor
Pasechnik also worked) before he defected and now works with the U.S. government
seeking antidotes for the very weapons he developed. Those who have died, he
says, did not really know anything about biological weapons, and if there were a
conspiracy to kill scientists with such knowledge, he would be dead. ''I
considered all this a little artificial, because a number of them couldn't have
been considered B.W. experts,'' he says with a hint of disdain. ''I got an
e-mail from Pasechnik before he died, and he was working on a field completely
different from this. People say to me, 'Ken, you could be a target,' but if you
start thinking about this, then your life is over. I'm not saying I'm not
worried, but I'm not paying much attention. I'm opening my mail as usual. If I
see something suspicious, I know what to do.''

Others are not quite as sanguine. Phyllis Della-Latta is the director of
clinical microbiology services at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical
Center. She found an article on the deaths circulating in the most erudite place
-- an Internet discussion group of directors of clinical microbiology labs
around the world. These are the people who, when a patient develops suspicious
symptoms, are brought in to rule out things like anthrax.

Della-Latta, whom I know from past medical reporting, forwarded the article to
me with a note: ''See attached. FYI. Should I be concerned??? I'm off on a
business trip to Italy tomorrow & next week. If I don't return, write my
obituary.''

She now says she doesn't really believe there is any connection between the
deaths. ''It's probably only coincidence,'' she says, then adds: ''But if we
traced back a lot of things that we once dismissed as coincidence -- foreigners
taking flying lessons -- we would have found they weren't coincidence at all.
You become paranoid. You have to be.''

Don Wiley's body was finally found on Dec. 20, near Vidalia, La., about 300
miles south of where he disappeared.

The Memphis medical examiner, O.C. Smith, concluded that yellow paint marks on
Wiley's car suggest that he hit a construction sign on the Hernando DeSoto
Bridge, as does the fact that a hubcap was missing from the right front tire.
Smith's theory is that heavy truck traffic on the bridge can set off wind gusts
and create ''roadway bounce,'' which might have been enough to cause Wiley to
lose his balance after getting out of the car to inspect the scrapes. He was
6-foot-3, and the bridge railing would have only come up to mid-thigh.

''If Dr. Wiley were on the curb trying to assess damage to his car, all of these
factors may have played a role in his going over the rail,'' Smith said when he
issued his report. Bone fractures found on the body support this theory. Wiley
suffered fractures to his neck and spine, and his chest was crushed, injuries
that are consistent with Wiley's hitting a support beam before he landed in the
water.

The Wiley family considers this case closed. ''These kinds of theories are
something that's always there,'' says Wiley's wife, Katrin Valgeirsdottir, who
has heard all the rumors. ''People who want to believe it will believe it, and
there's nothing anyone can say.''

The Memphis Police also consider the case closed, and the local office of the
F.B.I. has turned its attention to other odd happenings. The talk of Memphis at
the moment is the bizarre ambush of the city's coroner last month. He was
wrapped in barbed wire and left lying in a stairwell of the medical examiner's
building with a live bomb strapped to his chest.

Coincidentally, that coroner, O.C. Smith, was also the coroner who did the
much-awaited, somewhat controversial autopsy on Don Wiley.

What are the odds of that?

From an old BBC news report:

Monkeys invade Delhi government
Tuesday, 9 January, 2001, 14:38 GMT

Thousands of monkeys are invading government buildings in Delhi, forcing employees to arm themselves with sticks and stones in case they are attacked.
    At least 10,000 monkeys are creating havoc in the Indian capital by barging into government offices, stealing food, threatening bureaucrats and even ripping apart valuable documents.
    The increasingly aggressive animals swing effortlessly between the offices of the defence, finance and external affairs ministries and some have even been spotted in the prime minister's office.
    "They are moving in very high security areas," says Defence Ministry officer, IK Jha.
    Officials say there is little that can be done.
    Killing the animals is not an option because monkeys are a sacred symbol in Hinduism, India's main religion.
    The authorities used to capture the monkeys and ship them to neighbouring states, but this is no longer possible because other areas are now being over populated with monkeys.
    The government held a high-level meeting two years ago to solve the problem permanently.
    Suggestions ranged from setting up a separate park for captured monkeys to "monkey contraception."
    Nothing has been done since then and employees still walk to work in fear of attack.
     "I am sometimes faced with groups of monkeys, big huge looking fellows," says government employee Surekha Rao. "What I do is make some noise with my shoes so the monkey moves away."
    Animal rights activists say the main problem is not the rising number of monkeys but the growing population of humans.
    "We have encroached on their homelands, we have taken away their fruits, we have reduced their water sources and we are trapping them from their home range, from their forests, so they are coming to urban areas," says rights activist Iqbal Malik.

A monkey that is sitting atop the statue of Lord Hanuman for the past twenty-two days is attracting streams of people.

FROM LOCAL NEWS REPORT:
BANGALORE-AUG 23: This is the story of a male adult monkey that has metamorphosised as God Hanuman. No joke. A monkey sitting atop the statue of God Hanuman for the past twenty-two days is attracting streams of people to this unbelievable happening . It all happened at Thimmaganapalli. A monkey just came inside the Altar or sanctum to the surprise of the priest and other on lookers. They bet the monkey with the stick and many have even threw stones. In the melee the monkey bore all this and came out with a new avatar as monkey God. The effort of the villagers to chase the monkey did not yield any results. The monkey doesn't eat anything, not even a delicious banana.
       "This is the reincarnation of God. This monkey is no ordinary monkey. It has come here twenty two days back and sitting here day and night. I come in the morning and perform pooja till late night. Thousands of people across are coming to see this wonder. For the people of this village this is for good. For the first five days we tried to chase this monkey away from the temple but it did not budge and inch. Then the elders decided that it is God and we are performing pooja," said Krishnamurthy, priest of the Hanuman temple.
        The word spread across attracting thousands of people to see this ardent devotee. "I have come from Hindupur to see this wonder. This is really God coming in new avtar and reincarnation. For me this is God and for Good, said Nirmala, a visitor.
     Even now the monkey is sitting atop the statue like a rock. People are thronging and performing pooja. (ANI)

=====

from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2224025.stm

Court orders release for 'monkey god'
By Omer Farooq
BBC reporter in Hyderabad

Aug 29: A court in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh has ordered the state authorities to help free a monkey that has been confined inside a temple for the last month.
     The monkey has been kept within the temple's inner-most chambers in the belief that it is the reincarnation of a much loved Hindu monkey god - Hanuman.
     The court issued the orders in response to a writ petition filed by an animal rights group, Karuna, based in Anantapur.
     The bench directed the Anantapur district superintendent of police to send a team of veterinary doctors to examine the condition of the monkey and treat it as necessary.
     The court also asked the police to extend all necessary help in securing the monkey's freedom.
     A spokesperson from the animal rights group, Gangi Reddy, said the monkey was locked up after local people spotted it perched atop an idol of Hanuman in a deserted temple on 1 August.
    Devotees mistook the monkey to be a reincarnation of Hanuman and the animal has been forcibly confined within the temple's inner sanctum ever since.
  Local officials say hundreds of devotees throng the temple every day to pay their respects to the monkey.
  But the court has directed local authorities to examine the entire episode and investigate allegations that the monkey is being used to exploit religious sentiments and make money.
   Meanwhile, a veterinary doctor who examined the monkey says the animal is in good health - and seems unwilling to leave the temple premises.

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