October 29, 2003

Patterns in randomness

Most days that I’m at my desk, I listen to music through iTunes for most of the day. For some time, I’ve been listening to one giant smart playlist that has all the tracks I haven’t listened to yet–which is currently at about five days-worth of music–played in shuffle mode.

Now, I’ve noticed in the past that occasionally this produces a long run of especially good music, or a run of not-so-great music. This kind of pattern is to be expected.

Today, it’s getting weird, though. It played three Banco de Gaia songs in a row (I have six tracks by them, out of a total track count of 6300). And two different renditions of Perfidia a few minutes apart.

In a sufficiently large set of randomizations (I’ve listened to thousands of tracks in iTunes), spurious patterns will emerge. Some people are led to believe this means that aliens, giant space fairies, or other metaphysical forces are guiding their lives, or their copy of iTunes, or whatever. I am not one of these people, but it’s interesting to see it in action.

Lott still suffers from foot-in-mouth disease

What are we doing in Iraq again? Stopping the imminent threat posed by Saddam’s WMD’s? Nope. Stopping his WMD programs? Nope, that’s not it either. Liberating the oppressed Iraqi people? Yeah, that must be it. No, wait:

In a sign of frustration, he offered an unorthodox military solution: “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You’re dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out.”

I suppose this is that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” logic.