Blog: Numb3rs

This week's episode of NUMB3RS opened with Professor Eppes giving a lecture on randomness. He showed two sets of dots, one with some clusters and some empty areas, the other with the dots fairly evenly spread out. Most of the class chose the second as the most random, wrongly. Aha, I thought, a neat coincidence that they are talking about the way humans see patterns where none exist, just a few days after I posted about this in connection with Steven Levy's iPod shuffle experience. But in this case, there was a pattern, as a few scenes later Eppes uses the very same example of the iPod torn right from the pages of the book.

Episodes take weeks or more to write and produce, so the writers likely based this one on the book, which came out six weeks ago. But it's surely just randomness that I saw the show days after hearing Levy speak. After all, if the two events hadn't coincided in time, I probably wouldn't have written a blog post about this. The fact that I did makes it noticed, and noticing coincidence makes us see the clusters all the more clearly even when they occur randomly.