I managed to post 2,194 Song of the Day posts without once featuring a Nelly Furtado song, and now I’m posting my second in a week.
One of the hardest concepts for me to wrap my mind around is the idea of true randomness. Every time I’m in my car and randomly hear three Beatles songs back-to-back-to-back, I figure something must be wrong with the stereo system.
But that’s exactly what a random dispersal of songs should turn up every once in awhile. Given a large sample size, you’ll always wind up with those clusters. If the lineup was exactly calibrated so that a certain amount of time elapsed between repeats of any artist, that would be the opposite of randomness.
But our brains want to assign meaning to those groupings. It’s called the clustering illusion, or the “hot-hand fallacy,” referring to those lucky runs in gambling that make you feel like you’re somehow beating the odds. You aren’t… you’re just in the middle of a cluster of wins. Soon enough you’ll be in the middle of a cluster of losses, and you won’t feel so lucky then.
Check out these two images:
The one on the left is a random dispersal of points. The one on the right is correcting for clusters. From this view, the one on the left certainly looks more random. But when you’re experiencing one of those little clumps of dots, it feels like anything but.
So right now we’re in a little Nelly Furtado cluster. And the science is more interesting than the song.
Say it right, say it all
You either got it or you don’t
You either stand or you fall
When your will is broken
When it slips from your hands
When there’s no time for joking
There’s a hole in the plan
Oh, you don’t mean nothing at all to me
No, you don’t mean nothing at all to me
Oh, you’ve got what it takes to set me free
Oh, you could mean everything to me
I can’t say that I’m not lost and found
I can’t say that I don’t love the light and the dark
I can’t say that I don’t know that I am alive
And all of what I feel I could show you tonight
Oh, you don’t mean nothing at all to me
No, you don’t mean nothing at all to me
Oh, you’ve got what it takes to set me free
Oh, you could mean everything to me
From my hands I can give you, something that I made
From my mouth I can sing you another brick that I laid
From my body I can show you a place, God knows
If you know this place is holy, do you really want to go?
Meet Me In Montauk 
This post is timely for us as, during our vacation, our Mazda rental car had a quirk in which it would not shuffle the iPod songs even if we had shuffled them on the iPod. After a few days of frustration with this, mostly eminating from our family’s official DJ, Daniel, I suggested that he do a google search to see if others had experienced this issue with the Mazda and if there was a solution. Lo and behold, Daniel discovered that this was a well known problem and that the suggested work around was to switch the car stereo to FM, start the iPod shuffle so that it was not playing through the Bluetooth, and then switch to Bluetooth. We tried it and, thankfully, it worked. Of course, this meant I had to ensure that, each time we were heading to the car, I turned on the iPod in shuffle mode so that, when the Bluetooth kicked in, all would be well. Doing this made me the hero of our DJ.
Anyway, despite the workaround and my diligent efforts to avoid the lack of shuffle issue, there were a few times when we would nevertheless hear a clump of artists or would hear the next artist alphabetically (we were shuffling from playlists we had previously created for our last California trip and the graduation party). Inevitably, as soon as the second or third song from the same artist or the next artist in the alphabet played, Daniel groaned that we had not done the workaround correctly. At first, I thought he was right and we would try again with the FM switch. However, after awhile, usually when Daniel was paying less attention, I would let the cluster play through and then the iPod would move on to another artist elsewhere in the alphabet.
So that was one of our hot hand fallacy experience. The other one involved me at the black jack table in Vegas, but that’s a story best left untold.š
Fascinating critique of Nelly Fritanga. What did happen at that Black Jack table? I want the whole story!
Well, this has been very interesting! I enjoyed the science lesson very much, and I, too, want to know what happened at the black jack table š
Okay, fine. I’ll confess. I played at two different casinos for about 2 hours at each one and ended up down $75.00. I consider that a “win.”