Just what is Yahoo! Insider trying to tell me?

I cant tell you the exact figures like insider does bit there is a principle called the Birthday Parradox and is usefull in several different areas (for example, cryptography and hashing algorithms). Try it yourself -- the next time you are at a gathering of 20 or 30 people, ask everyone for their birth date. It is likely that two people in the group will have the same birthday. It always surprises people!

The reason this is so surprising is because we are used to comparing our particular birthdays with others. For example, if you meet someone randomly and ask him what his birthday is, the chance of the two of you having the same birthday is only 1/365 (0.27%). In other words, the probability of any two individuals having the same birthday is extremely low. Even if you ask 20 people, the probability is still low -- less than 5%. So we feel like it is very rare to meet anyone with the same birthday as our own.

When you put 20 people in a room, however, the thing that changes is the fact that each of the 20 people is now asking each of the other 19 people about their birthdays. Each individual person only has a small (less than 5%) chance of success, but each person is trying it 19 times. That increases the probability dramatically.

They are just trying to flatter you. Saying you're "one in a million" ten times over ;)

I am quite sure Yahoo does not have a department that goes around recording birthdays for the whole world, so I'd say they're just guessing, confident that you'll never be able to disprove them.

@first answerer -- put a piece of foil over the webcam on your lappie, to be on the safe side.

Re add details: either they're not counting China (not fair, they have birthdays too) or the quote is many many years out of date and they've not bothered updating it. The latter more likely. So don't take their word for the blinking, eating and days spent shaving, either.

IF they say anything about X number of Y's laid end to end would go to the moon and back Z times, you can believe those, as the moon only goes a teeeeny bit further from us each year. They measure it by bouncing lasers off special reflectors left there I think on the last manned mission there.

I think it's just a statistic based on averages.

It also has told me :

How many times I blink and they cant possibly KNOW that I blink more than most people..

I bat my eyelashes an flirt a lot.

:)

And they cant really know how much time I spend eating or sleeping.... at least I *hope* they aren't watching me!!!!