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The Perception of 'Random' on the iPod
Robaato writes "Stephen Levy writes in the Guardian about the perception of randomness, or the lack thereof, on an iPod set to shuffle." From the article: "My first iPod loved Steely Dan. So do I. But not as much as my iPod did.... I didn't keep track of every song that played every time I shuffled my tunes, but after a while I would keep a sharp ear out for what I came to call the LTBSD (Length of Time Before Steely Dan) Factor. The LTBSD Factor was always perplexingly short." My first iPod shuffle refused to let me delete (sigh) Weird Al's Polkamon off of the flash memory.
Is the iPod Shuffle Playing Favorites?
How about an analysis of the randomness of Zonk dupes. I guess I should be happy it's not a games story.
My iPod likes Slayer and Marilyn Manson. I guess its posessed.
Nonsense article again, but because it was about iPods it had to be published on the front page.
Thank you Slashdot and all the friends here - my time among you is almost at an end. I will find another news site where I can actually read something that is worth reading. Slashdot used to be a great site, but it's nothing but shit nowadays. Bye bye!
What, we're losing Anonymous Coward? He's been here since the begining, and he wrote half the posts! OH NOES!!!!1!
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Maybe iPods are showing us their souls. The inner light is shining through.
How to Download YouTube Videos
I think it's more than that. Yes, coincidences will happen, but I also think part of the issue with people perceiving patterns is that they can switch patterns whenever a new pattern seems to emerge. So, with reference to the Birthday Paradox, it's true that, in a party, it's more likely than you think that two people will have the same birthday, but what if you aren't bound by birthdays? What if you're just constantly looking for anything two people could have in common? If you're at the party constantly talking about dates, birthdays, anniversaries, favorite colors, food alergies, etc.-- then there's an excellent chance that you'll find there are lots of people in the party that something in common.
In the case of the iPod, i have an iPod and put it on shuffle often enough. For a little while, i'd always be suspicious that there was something going on. It seemed to happen way too often that I'd get two songs together off the same album or the same band, or I'd get a bunch of '80s songs together, or a lot of songs that I'd grouped in the same genre. You know, no specific pattern I could use to predict what would come next, but on any given day, I seemed to be able to find a pattern.
It wasn't always very conscious or thought out, but I'd catch myself thinking, "weird, I've heard 4 songs from the same album in the last hour. The iPod must not be mixing it up enough." But then I noticed some of my patterns were like, "huh, I've heard a couple Nirvana songs and Foo Fighter songs. My iPod must like Dave Grohl today." And then I realized, I didn't have the name "Dave Grohl" in any metadata anywhere. In order for the pattern to be caused by the library, you'd have to assume that the iPod's circutry somehow knew that Grohl was in both of those bands, but without any such link existing in my iTunes library.
So of course I got rid of the iPod, because it was obviously possessed by the devil and obessesed with Dave Grohl. I guess this guy is right.
too important to be left to chance."
This is exactly the thing I try to point out to people who play the lottery and insist that their numbers are far more likely to come up than the 1 2 3 4 5 I suggest they play.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar