Well, hey, just be glad that you aren’t one of the Seven Most Bizarrely Unlucky People who ever Lived.

Number one on the list is the only human being ever to be nuked twice. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima in the when the first bomb hit and Nagasaki when the second one hit and lived (until quite recently) to tell the tale. The link to this story comes via Jim Elvidge, who espouses an interesting variation on the Simulation Hypothesis. Per Elvidge, anomalies such as these can be viewed as Easter eggs — little clues that our universe may be, if not an outright practical joke, perhaps an excessively elaborate work of performance art.

I’m not sure that any of these coincidences rise to the bizarreness level required to question the universe around me, but the guy who got struck by lightning seven times is pretty interesting. I can’t quite get my head around the odds against that, as stated in the linked article. It seems that human history could have run many times over without this ever happening.

So it’s an outlier, for sure. But proof that the world is a simulation? I’ll need something even weirder, I’m afraid.

We interviewed Elvidge a while back and are looking to have him back on the podcast soon.