Thursday, January 12, 2006

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence...

...so what the hell is five times?

Ever since I recovered from the car accident, one of my goals has been to get back in shape and not look quite so much like what you imagine a professional couch potato would look like. Got a bike, and I ride it at least five times a week. Got free weights, and I use those every other day.
To motivate myself and keep all that stuff from gathering dust like it usually does whenever someone buys exercise equipment, I spent hours poring over my CD collection so I could build a kick-ass workout playlist for the iPod that would make Barney jealous for it's level of psyched-upedness. And so far, it's worked -- with one bizarre side effect.

I always put the iPod on random play, but for the last five workouts, every time I've started to do crunches (the last, and because of my big buddha belly, toughest part of the workout), "20th Century Boy" by T-Rex has come on. Every freaking time. There are over 100 songs on that playlist, and I rarely hear anything else repeated from workout to workout, but T-Rex, every time at the same time?

Add to this the fact that, whenever I stumble across "The Karate Kid" on cable (and it's on every day of the year), it is always at the exact same scene: Daniel-san picking up Elisabeth Shue to go to Golf 'N Stuff.

To quote Matt Kennedy Gould, what is going on here???????

2 comments:

  1. Random playlists sometimes are, I guess.

    I use smart playlists that won't play anything that's been recently played. But that doesn't work so well for ya if you want it to point at a particular playlist and then play everything that's not recently played (that's more of a party shuffle thing).

    I got nothin'.

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  2. I'm no expert, but apparently 'random numbers' created by computers are 'seeded' by a combination of date/time/ etc and then multiplied by one of a set series of numbers, thus making them 'predictable'. Do you always start your workouts at the same time of day and follow them in the same pattern? That could explain the seeming coincidence. This technique was apparently used by early codebreakers to determine enemy 'keys' by learning the computer plus date and time of expected en/decryption.

    Hope this helps!!

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