We come, finally, to the saturnine, earthy children of Capricorn, the Goat, who share a birth sign, said to be "feminine," with Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Woodrow Wilson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Elvis.
(Incidentally, if you are looking for an even chance that someone in the room will have your exact birthday, you will need 253 people). And yet despite numbers like these, we are constantly surprised when we meet a stranger with whom we share a birth date or a hometown or a middle name.
For those who may not know, sharing a birth story is a thing in the blogosphere and has been for a long while.
I've grown up listening to Beyoncé, which says less about my age (we share a birth year -- 1981) and more about how long Bey has been performing.
When multiple percentiles shared a single birth weight, the birth weight was assigned to the midpoint percentile.
For instance, one woman shared a "detailed birth story that just highlighted so many of the things that I would want them to know and understand about birth but coming from someone that they saw as their peer…a different source besides the doctors or nurses" (Physician 2).
Jane Hirshfield's A Blessing for Wedding takes the form of a litany, invoking a multi-faceted image of marriage as promises kept, loneliness shared, a circle encompassing birth, fertility and death.
For instance, in a room full of 50 people, it's likely at least two will share a random birth date; a simple equation can predict that probability.
1 Erickson and Bjerkedal reasoned that if interpregnancy interval is causal it can only affect the second of the two births that define an interval between pregnancies, 6 yet they observed that both births shared a very similar relation between interpregnancy interval and mean birth weight.
