We first came across the idea of "cosmic synchronization," a.k.a. the serendipitous convergence of events, while reading the memoirs of the writer Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov was a man keenly attuned to patterns - the kind you experience in life as well as the kind you make or create, when, say, you assemble particular song lists for your iPod, reorganize problems or people at work, or, in his case, write a short story or a novel. Cosmic synchronization was what he called the patterns that strike us as marvelous coincidence. Well, we recently experienced an interesting convergence. Perhaps not of cosmic significance, but remarkable nonetheless, this little convergence links the last three of our posts on Einstein, musical improvisation and amateurism into a larger and synthetic whole