[tyen]

You fail to address my point. There might be a hundred cities in the world with similar, low probabilities of being passed by a major hurricane. 0.3% x 100 = 30% annual probability that one will be affected. It would be illogical, after the fact, to be surprised that any particular member of that set had been affected. Now, if you predicted that Portland, Maine, specifically, would be affected this year, and this came to pass, it would be impressive. But retrospectively, it doesn't mean a damn thing, because you get to pick which "coincidences" to get excited about.

You have lost me here. I interpreted the analysis to say that the 0.2% expresses the probability across the set of all U.S. microbiologists that 11 would die of unnatural causes within a span of 4.5 months, not the set of unity for one microbiologist to die from an unnatural cause within a span of 4.5 months, which could then be multiplied by the population of all microbiologists. What steps did you take in your interpretation of the analysis' scope?

[The Great Satan]

You have lost me here. I interpreted the analysis to say that the 0.2% expresses the probability across the set of all U.S. microbiologists that 11 would die of unnatural causes within a span of 4.5 months, not the set of unity for one microbiologist to die from an unnatural cause within a span of 4.5 months, which could then be multiplied by the population of all microbiologists. What steps did you take in your interpretation of the analysis' scope?

The set of microbiologists is only one of a virtually infinite number of sets of similar size for which one could dream up some tenuous, hypothetical link to a worldwide terrorist plot. The set itself has been "cherry-picked" after the fact. Not only that, but the precise borders of the set have been tailored and defined to make the coincidence appear bigger than it really is. For example, was the most prominent scientist in this set, Don Wiley, really a microbiologist? Only in a very loose sense -- he would normally be considered a structural biologist. If the real, untailored set is "biologists" rather than "microbiologists," we might easily be talking about a pool of 200,000 people instead of 20,000 people, in which case the "coincidence" would disappear into the background. This is how we make mountains out of molehills, statistically speaking.