[graydsl]

I never heard about such a phenomenon before. But yesterday I read about it in The Long Earth by Terry Pratchet and Stephen Baxter. Life is weird sometimes...

[Tsiklon]

I've encountered this a few times - Frequency Illusion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Where something appears with improbable frequency shortly after discovery. It's a pretty weird phenomenon isn't it?

[simonh]

Also given hundreds of people reading this article on HN, what are the chances that none of them would also recently have read about a related phenomenon?

[riffraff]

I learned about this from the "Science of Discworld" books, I believe the first one, which I cannot recommend enough if you like Sir Terry.

[madengr]

It’s in Isamov’s Robot series, but I won’t give any spoilers.