it's an amazing coincidence

By an amazing coincidence, just as I have started wrestling with the cybernetic & philosophic - I feel a bit like starting a crusade today, for consistency in adjectival ending - issues of artificial life, the NYT ran an article on viruses, which raises the specific issue of whether viruses are life or not, and the further issue of the complete absence of a technical, consistently applicable definition of life, and, even more amazingly, I read a brief report on planet searching which predicts the soon discovery of a planet that support life. I guess the author(s) of the second article hadn't read the first.

Wait, is it an amazing coincidence? This book will probably take a month to consume, and I read 4 papers a day, and all of them support science journalism. So in a month that's around 200 articles on science, and let's face it, artificial life, writ broadly, is a zeitgeisty sort of topic that's likely to attract the attention of science-desk editors (populist sorts of, hmm, guys, probably). You'd expect it to be well represented. So it's not an amazing coincidence. It would actually be an amazing uncoincidence if I hadn't run across at least a couple of related articles over the course of a as yet incomplete month. Not that amazing uncoincidences are particularly noticeable - do you think something can be amazing, and unnoticeable at the same time? I suspect not.

So, it's just a coincidence. But even coincidence has "amazing" built into it, to a degree. OK, so literally it looks like two things happening at the same time, "co" + "incident", but try it. "The traffic lights went read and coincidentally the cars stopped". "Coincidentally one car didn't stop and coincidentally hit the cars going through the intersection". Hmm. All those things happened at the same time, but there was no coincidence. Stopping at the red light was predictable. Not stopping wasn't predictable, but the accident as a result of not stopping was. I think I'll have to probe the semantics of concidence at a future time, because I have a bus to catch, but I've established that my reading material isn't coincident, which was the local purpose of the semantic investigation.

My reading actually characterises me, it characterises science journalism, it characterises media economics. If it were coincidence, it wouldn't characterise anything, this seems like the essential difference; things that happen at the same time may be characteristic, or they may be coincident.

Depending on whose point of view?