Senior recognition

I seem to have fallen into the way of seeing someone A, in real life, in a picture or on television and being absolutely sure that they are the same as somebody else B, usually known from something or other on ITV3.

This evening, the someone A was Hilda Braid as an old lady in the episode of 'Midsomer Murders' called 'Dead Man's Eleven', while the somebody else B was Margaret Lacey as another old lady in 'Diamonds are Forever'. The match was made on the basis of their two voices, two voices which I was convinced must have come from the same person. If the computer which served the HSBC service desk could identify my voice over a noisy telephone line, I was sure I could pull the same trick. See reference 1.

It was not until some time later that it occurred to me that there was a problem with age, it being hard to be an old lady in 1971 and again in 1999, nearly thirty years later. Checking, they are indeed the two aforementioned, quite different people, with the latter some twenty years older than the former and dead ten years when the relevant episode of 'Midsomer Murders' was made.

What seems to be happening is that I do indeed pick up some similarity between the two people in question, but then jump to conclusions, failing to remember that there are a lot of people out in the world and it is not that unusual for one to be like another in some respect or another.

Perhaps it would help if I try to remember the business about birthdays. There might be 365 days in most years but if you put 20 people in a room it is quite likely that two of them will share a birthday. Or something like that; the point being that the 20 number is a lot less than you might otherwise have thought.

PS: a little later: google does it again with the search term 'twenty people same birthday' yielding the answer in both of the first two hits.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/scientific-american.html.