I was reading a very provocative article recently in the British Medical Journal which documented a large-scale study of cancer-clusters they occur in northern England and Scotland. There are sometimes some rather unfortunate coincidences, and the malign occasional clicks and buzzes of the power-supply box on the other side of my bedroom wall occasionally comes to my mind as a possible reason for my failures in life, such as they are (ice-cream price-hikes, bad luck on the horses, &c).
Their conclusion was that it was in all but a very few cases very likely that these clusters were caused by pure chance. But, unlike most studies of this sort, they didn’t leave it at that; they produced a graph (that I cannot reproduce here for copyright reasons) plotting the frequency of cancer cases against the distance from the nearest gambling establishment (including national lottery vendors), and found an almost exact distance-squared correlation. They thus concluded that seven eight nine.
Ba-dumpf! Bet you didn’t see that coming.