Insipred by the coin-flipping discussion, a correspondent writes,

Are you familiar with the iPod “Shuffle” controversy of perhaps a year and a half or two years ago? If not, I’ll offer briefly, as you might enjoy, or find useful for class: when the iPod Shuffle came out, and was said to be an entirely random playing of one’s iPod songlist, hundreds and soon thousands of users complained or simply commented on how it absolutely was NOT random. The wrote passionately on the web of how they would hear song X 5 times in a day, and not hear song Y for a week.

Apple would not give out the algorithms for mathematicians to check. But that didn’t stop math students, grad students and professors from weighing in. The results, as I understand them, said that the “Shuffle” was as random can be, but that randomness does not appear random (your point, on the radio), and with music this is complicated because we respond to our favorite songs differently than others. So our brains create patterns of order which are really…random. Naturally, most people who believed their iPod Shuffles (or the Shuffle function on their other iPods) to be non-random found this a bunch of hooey. But then the root of “belief” is Old English and German, coming from “dear” and “love”. So we believe what we hold dear, what we love; and we come to love what we believe. And of course it’s hard to change minds in love…. Which brings us to your other discipline, political science.

I hadn’t heard about that Ipod thing–it does seem like a good example for teaching probability.