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Posted: 11-11-2002 16:23 Post subject:

By lucky you mean fridge breaking down and then winning £400, kind of lucky then this happens to me all the time, I also get feelings about stuff (where to find things people are looking for etc) so I guess I am lucky.
The downside is of course that by a quirk of fate I have no references so am unemployable.

Posted: 12-11-2002 00:01 Post subject:

Posted: 12-11-2002 00:36 Post subject:

I consider that I am lucky... to some extent. I have never broken a single bone in my body and have never been in hospital except for one night and that was only for a stomach pain that cleared up in a short time.
Other aspects of my life I haven't always been lucky.
I have found that if I desperately need something (like a parking space when I'm late for work) then I generally get it.

Posted: 12-11-2002 18:47 Post subject:

Maybe its just a really common superpower.

Posted: 12-11-2002 19:28 Post subject:

I used all my luck meeting my fiance. Other than that, my luck sucks. I've been mugged twice, I've broken my knuckle and my foot twice, and I've had so many cuts requiring stitches it's stupid. Although that's probably most likely clumsiness.

I think luck is like when you say Cosmicbaby, getting 1st class in planes, and good hotel rooms. Or it may all just be a coinky dink.

I think luck, to me, would be chance events that occur in your favor, or make you happy. I'm not sure that there is such thing as 'luck'. Maybe it's just Karma and the universe works out a way to mess up your life and then gives you some reward for pissing you off.

I had a point somewhere, but I'm not quite sure what it was.

Then again, ppl die badly and painfully by accidents all the time. And that's bad luck... but then again, every second you're alive and a piece of frozen pee doesn't crash through your roof and crush you, or you don't get struck by lightning or something then that's good luck right?

Or is good/bad luck just when things go horribly wrong, or amazingly good?

It's all part of the big cosmic joke.

Posted: 12-11-2002 19:39 Post subject: My Theory

My theory on the subject of luck (apart from the kind you make yourself) is that it is pretty much randomly distributed. If you image little "Luck" graphs for every member of the population, you will find that they sum up to something like a Bell curve, or possibly a "power" curve, since some of the things people call "luck" involve money and other factors which definitely become rare quickly as the sums involved mount--compare the number of people in Bill Gates' income bracket with the number of people who earn $1 a day to understand what I mean by a power curve.

That said, some people who have extraordinary good luck and some would have extraordinary bad luck, and some would have weird patterns of luck--winning lotteries easily but never managing to get their car to work, for example.

The luck would still be random but it would look unrandom as all Hades.

Illustration:

The two runs of heads and tails below are equally probable:

H H H H H H H H H H H H
H T H T T H T T H H H T

But if you got the first run (whether for good or bad), you might believe your luck was anything but random.

I was thinking about the origins of life recently in these terms, and it occurred to me that it is possible that Life is highly improbable and virtually inevitable at the same time, like the fact that somebody is guaranteed to win the big lottery prize even if the odds against it are astronomical from the point of view of any one ticket holder.

By the way, for a lark, I stopped my VCR at the time 3.14.16, and at that point on the tape it was Homer Simpson saying the word "pie". There are about 25,000 seconds worth of tape on a cassette, but the chance of somebody, somewhere doing what I did is--very probably--immensely unlikely and virtually inevitable.

There is probably enough tape of THE SIMPSONS in the world to run to the Sun and back--and it would work just as well if somebody else had said "pie" or "magpie" or "pied piper" at 3.14.16.

Luck is weird because probability is weird and only vaguely understood. You may have heard a silly calculation of the probability of Life arising randomly based on a calculation of the amount of information represented by the base pairs of human DNA (Sir Fred Hoyle, the brilliant and maverick astronomer put out the figure 10 to the 42,000th power), but this is silly and wrong: it is a calculation of the amount of information in one end-product (human DNA), not of the probability of the evolutionary process. The rice genome has more base pairs (because plants double their chromosome counts very easily) but rice is not more improbable than Sir Fred Hoyle!

Posted: 12-11-2002 20:13 Post subject:

One of my favorite sayings is "Fortune smiles on the prepared mind."

Since I believe we're all living the life we want to live--that we essentially create our own reality--we manufacture our own luck.

Posted: 12-11-2002 20:21 Post subject:

Well. I've never won the lottery. I've had premium bonds for about 30 years, but never won a dicky bird.

I won't mention any aspects in which I consider myself lucky, just in case some evil spirit is listening . . .

Break a leg!

Carole

Posted: 12-11-2002 21:07 Post subject: Throw some karma in the mix...

Just an example of seemingly unrelated events:

My mother has been the organist for a small
Lutheran church for over 50 years.
She has never been paid... its a purely
volunteer position.

On the occasional weekdays, she will stop by one
of the local casinos to play the 5-cent slot machines.
It is a rare day that she doesn't leave with about
a hundred dollars more than she went in with.

I'm really hard pressed to say the two events
are unrelated. Especially when her old lady
friends NEVER do nearly as well.
They regularly lose 5 or 10 dollars per visit.
(Being stingy old Lutheran ladies, no one
ever spends more than that --
but it keeps them busy for 2 or 3 hours at a time!)

I find it hard to dismiss the karma here.

TVgeek

Posted: 13-11-2002 02:59 Post subject: Luck

This all reminds me of a quote half remembered from a film or book. When some guy is accused of being just lucky having just pulled off some amazing stunt or trick he retorts:

"How odd that the more I practice the luckier i get."

(or something to that effect)

ring any bells for anyone or is this just me making stuff up?

Posted: 13-11-2002 11:45 Post subject: got there first - bastardo;)

Yitthian,

In the words of the 1/2lb burger himself "you took the words right out of my mouth".

I've normally seen this quote attributed to Gary Player, talking about his golf game. I consider there to be some wry truth in it.

Posted: 15-11-2002 02:10 Post subject: luck....or fate?

Last year a friend was driving me and my boyfriend up to the mountains for a day trip. This was was the worst driver I have ever seen. He would be going 80 mph, not watching the road, digging for stuff in the glove compartment or lighting a smoke. I knew that we were probably going to crash and die from a few minutes after we left (why I didn't demand he stop so we could get out and walk back, I don't know. confused

)
Anyways, we were getting to the foothills, and the road was getting hilly and more windy. He was driving at least 90 mph. We lost control on a curve and went off an embankment. We actually were AIRBORN! (I never knew that could happen in real life-it DOES) I'll never forget that crash. It was one of those things where life seems to go in slow motion. When we hit the ground, I remember feeling the force of how fast we were going start to flip the car, and I thought, "this could be my last few seconds on earth". I'm not sure what happened then, but I remember crashing into a fence, swerving all over the place, and eventually coming to a smoking stop. We (by the grace of God) hadn't flipped. Amazingly, no one even had a bruise.
I've always thought of what could have happened if there were another car on the road or if we HAD flipped over. Going that fast, we would have been history. But, I guess the Gods were on our side, or perhaps we just weren't ready to die that day. So...luck? Or fate? My guess was that there was a LOT of both. Smile

Posted: 15-11-2002 02:28 Post subject: Cheers

Cheers Eljubbo,

I assume the half-pound burger is the mighty Loaf?

I didn't fink i was making it up - but i couldn't be sure.

El Bastardo? Yep that's me!

Posted: 15-11-2002 08:53 Post subject:

Posted: 16-12-2002 17:30 Post subject: Pure Luck

Me mum and dad both did the national lottery.
they both did random numbers and my dad said which ticket did my mum want.
she picked and they sat watching the lottery. my mum suddenly shrieked........ she had won £450.

has anybody had some purely family related coincidence???

she tried to offer it to my dad (it was the ticket he actually chose the numbers for) but he refused.......