I was explained the origin of the original Apple logo, the one with the rainbow colours. It was a beautiful story, a perfect tribute to Alan Turing - the great gay mathematician who in 1954 laced an apple with cyanide and took a bite, his suicide driven by society's oppression of homosexuality. The rainbow apple with a bite taken out, made a perfect logo - how could it not.

Some years later, I discovered that Apple's perfect tribute to "the father of computer science" was indeed a classic myth. When asked Steve Jobs said “it isn’t true but God we wish it were".

The logo colours are not actually rainbow colours, they stack from green through red to a mid blue. No rainbow ever looked like that. And rainbow colours were only adopted by the gay community in 1978, a year after Apple's logo was introduced. Designer Rob Janoff explained - the colour stripes represented Apple's commitment to colour, and the bite was to show scale - without which the apple looked like a cherry. 

I tell this story because it reminds me of the power of coincidence to mislead, and the attraction of a beautiful story wrapped in history. Truth though, is often mundane. Coincidence is not evidence, a point worth remembering when something appears too true to be true.