It does plug into your head.
On a walk around Lake Christopher today, my iPod Shuffle played "Pink Cadillac," probably my favorite Bruce song. Mostly because he invented the word "pank" just for that, and the drums sound like gun shots. Anyway, I'm thinking, what about "Rosalita?" That's a hell of a song too. I'll listen to that when I get back.
"Rosalita" was the next song.
HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN?
My iTunes library has only 754 songs right now. I haven't added all my CDs since a recent reformat. Two songs out of 754 that have to get on the iPod. The Shuffle has 109 songs on it. Two shots at 109/754 (there's some combinatorial math there, beyond me). Then you need to have "Pink Cadillac" play out of the 10 or so songs I heard on the walk, so 10/109. THEN you have "Rosalita" next! I can't figure it out.
The only explanation is that the iPod READ MY MIND. This thing was so totally worth $99.
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music
7 comments:
You'd think you were listening to XM satellite radio...
There's actually some Excel functions for that, if you dig through there. What you're looking for is "HYPGEOMDIST," for hypergeometric distribution.
But, since specifics aren't necessary, I will round the couple of fractions here and say "not a good chance."
It gets it from your iTunes that you updated your shuffle with. Go to preferences/playback and there will be a slider that lets you choose how often things like that happen.
Kinda takes the magic out of it doesn't it?
Gosh, my statistics are kind of rusty, but I think this is in the ballpark.
Assuming that the Shuffle might conceivably repeat songs in the same use (I don't know if it has some guard against that but I imagine it doesn't) then the number of possible combinations of songs that could be played on your walk was 2.36736367 × 10 to the 20th power, or 109 to the tenth power. There were only nine chances within those ten songs for those two songs to be played in that specific order, Rosalita coming right after Pink Cadillac. Therefore, the chances are 9 in 2.36736367 × 10 to the 20th power, or 3.80169726 × 10 to the -20th power.
Really, really, really small, in other words. But still possible.
Brad, there is a "Smart Shuffle" slider that determines "how likely you are to hear multiple songs in a row by the same artist or from the same album." But that's an iTunes setting, not an iPod setting, I think. Anyway, it was dead on the middle, so I still think it's rather unlikely.
Thanks for taking a swing at the math, K. I figured it was a kind of low percentage. :P
I can read your mind. Ready?
Jessica Alba is hot.
Told ya.
Here's my stab...
You have a 1 in 754 chance to get the first song into your shuffle, and you have a 1 in 753 chance to get the second, over 109 trials...
2.09% chance to get both songs onto the iPod.
Once they're both on there, you have a 0.76% chance of having both songs play within those 10 samples. You have a 0.016% chance of them playing consecutively given any 2-song long sample of the entire playlist.
So, liberally speaking, you're looking at 2.09%*0.016%, which is 3.56*10^(-6) out of 1, or a 0.000356% chance...
So, if you went out walking a million times, this occurance would happen 3 or 4 times.
I'm sure someone can find a flaw in that math, in fact, I found one. Bonus points to anyone who figured out where I F'ed the dog. But, still, "not a good chance" sums it up.
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