3 unrandom podcasts about… randomness

Big Ideas on TVO has become one of my favorite podcasts to listen to.. well… Big ideas. I took statistics over the summer, and a lot of what we covered dealt with randomness. Unfortunately, I wasn’t familiar with Leonard Modinow before… but I am familiar with many of the points he brings up in his talk about his latest book “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

His talk also reminded me of a show WNYC Radio Lab did on randomness. They also seek to understand the role randomness plays in our lives. In fact they used the same example that Leonard mentions about the chance of a 56 game hitting streak happening again in 10,000 baseball scenarios.

Link to the Radio Lab episode on randomness

Finally, Leonard also mentions a study done with drinkers of Coke and Pepsi, which reminded me of a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell who also talked about the fragility of judgement using the Pepsi Challenge experiment. He also goes on to talk about how the Herman Miller Aron chair became first the most hated chair, and then the most popular selling chair (which reminds me of the Radio Lab episode where they tell the story of an opera that caused a riot, and years later was celebrated as a masterpiece).