Saturday, February 04, 2012

The Real Meaning Of Randomness: Clumping

On Thursday of this week, I had four completely unrelated e-mail inquiries come to me about Agile topics (three pertained to potential work engagements in the future, while the other was looking for suggestions for Agile books).

To put things in perspective, I would not typically get that many e-mails on different Agile topics over the course of an entire month! And yet, here they all were, arriving on the same day.

As I said to Vicki, that's what's so interesting about random events: they often clump, making them seem anything but random. But true randomness does do that, of course, as anyone who's ever seen "the birthday poll" done across a large number of people knows. (Get a large group of people to each write down their birthday, month-and-day, and then tabulate the results. At least a few dates will get three, four or even more hits, whereas other dates won't get any hits at all. It's never an even distribution, as one might expect.)

Anyway, I don't know what was in the drinking water on Thursday, but it was definitely something Agile-related!

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