hahaha You're right. That audio track was pure genius.

Eerie, my father suspected some special relationship was occuring, especially the Freudian s.

Political Conversation: Condi?s Slip A pressing issue of dinner-party etiquette is vexing Washington, according to a story now making the D.C. rounds: How should you react when your guest, in this case national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, makes a poignant faux pas? At a recent dinner party hosted by New York Times D.C. bureau chief Philip Taubman and his wife, Times reporter Felicity Barringer, and attended by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Maureen Dowd, Steven Weisman, and Elisabeth Bumiller, Rice was reportedly overheard saying, ?As I was telling my husb?? and then stopping herself abruptly, before saying, ?As I was telling President Bush.? Jaws dropped, but a guest says the slip by the unmarried politician, who spends weekends with the president and his wife, seemed more psychologically telling than incriminating. Nobody thinks Bush and Rice are actually an item. A National Security Council spokesman laughed and said, ?No comment.?

http://nymetro.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/n_10245/

Condi could've been talking about her husband in the previous sentence before the gaff, except Condi Rice is not and has never been married.

From Steven Levy's "Does Your iPod Play Favorites?": The question will be even more important to owners of the new tiny iPod Shuffles. These use a new feature called autofill to load the one-ounce players with a supposedly random selection of 120 or so songs from much larger collections. The first few times I tried this, I found some disturbing clusters in the songs chosen. More than once the "random" playlist included three tracks from the same album! Since there are more than 3,000 tunes in my library, this seemed to defy the odds.

Let's assume there are exactly 3000 songs in Levy's library and that they come from 300 albums, each with exactly 10 songs each. Further, let's assume that we choose exactly 120 songs at random from this library of 3000 songs. There are Binomial[3000, 120] ways of doing this. The number of ways of choosing 120 songs such that no two come from the same album is just the number of ways of choosing 120 albums out of the 300 (Binomial[300, 120]) multiplied by the number of ways of choosing one of the 10 songs from each of the 120 albums chosen (10^120). Therefore the probability that no two songs come from the same album is just (Binomial[300, 120] * 10^120)/Binomial[3000, 120] = 9.46 * 10^–12. This means that the probability that at least two songs of the 120 chosen come from the same album is 1 – 9.46 * 10^–12 = 0.99999999999054, practically a dead cert.

With slightly more involved calculations (Mathematica helps here), it can be shown that the probability that at least three songs of the 120 chosen come from the same album is 0.858, more than 85 % and far more likely than not.

Levy need not be concerned—the odds are not being defied.