My Statistical Outliers

Sometimes I get this feeling that I'm in a lot of outliers. In my senior year of high school the Tucson news did a story on a high school in California that had 7 sets of 'twins' in it's graduating class, little did they know that I Buena had 6 sets of same sex twins in it's graduating class and we all looked remarkably like our twin. (I can't say that we were all identical, but I'll be honest I Facebook stalked some of the ones I could remember to see if I could tell them apart in pictures and I as a twin couldn't be certain which one was which) Monozygotic twins  occur 3 in every 1000 births and there was 600 people in my graduating class and I'm almost certain 4 of the sets were identical. And there were probably boy/girl twins that I didn't know about because it wasn't obvious. I'm not going to crunch the numbers but I hope you can see that it's statistically significant.

The second more serious statistic I helped defy deals with brain tumors. According to recent studies 209 out of 100,000 people in the U.S. have lived or are still living with a brain tumor. According to my recent findings 5 people on my one street have been diagnosed with a Brain Tumor in the last 10 years and they were all under 60 (which is before the likeliness of being diagnosed goes up). 4 of these people lived on my street for a significant part of my life and the street doesn't really have a high turnaround of residents. So lets say there have been 500 different people who have lived on the street during my life time (I think that is probably an over estimation, but I'm trying to lessen the incidence). 5 in 500, that's .01 the average is .002. This means there should have been 1 person on my street that had a brain tumor, instead there are 5. 5 for every 1. That's what we call statistically significant. NOT good, and it makes me incredibly sad.

What does this mean, well maybe there's something wrong with our pipes, but honestly with all I've studied about the brain it would be pretty much impossible to figure out if it was something related that was causing our brain tumors, because they don't even have any solid risk factors. So I guess all we can really do is support each other better, because we have an odd cluster and know some of what they are going through, and pray for those struggling currently . Oh and support Brain Tumor Research, so maybe someday they will be able to look at these clusters and find what causes them.(this could be easily done at abta.org or braintumor.org, if you want to know the difference between them look at their 990s)