Stochasticity

Really great radio is as wonderful as any movie, live play, opera, classical dance or book that you’ll ever encounter! Radio, which we thought was a lost art, is growing more and more popular as creative and wildly interesting programming comes to a radio near you.
by Charlie Leck

Ever listen to Radio Lab? My, what a wonderful radio presentation! It’s just wonderful! I don’t catch them all but I try to listen to these productions each week. When I miss, I catch them on line at http://www.radiolab.org/.

Now, this weekend I listened to a remarkable presentation about stochasticity (or, really, randomness). Remarkable! One of the finest bits of radio I’ve ever heard. If you listen, it might make you say: “Oh, my God!”

Laura Buxton from Stoke-on-Trent in England, (at approximately ten years old at the time, eight years ago) sent off a balloon one windy day. Laura had put a message on her balloon asking the retriever to let Laura know about how far it had gotten.

The balloon traveled over a 140 miles to a small town in the south of England. It was retrieved by a little, 10 year old girl named Laura Buxton. This is for real!

Laura Buxton, of course, sat down and wrote a note to Laura Buxton.

The incident was so weird that the girls (and probably their parents) thought the two girls ought to get together. They did. On the day they met, the girls realized they looked an awful lot alike and were both wearing pink jumpers and jeans and they both owned black lab dogs, gray rabbist and guinea pigs that looked awfully alike; and, they both had the guinea pigs with them that day.

Miracle? Some inexplicable intervention?

“Maybe when we’re old grannies, we’ll find out,” one of the girls said.

The show asks: “How shall we think about this story?”

If you want to hear just the story of this “Very Luck Wind” you can click here!
If you want to hear the entire show about Stochasticity, you can click here!

If you listen to the entire show, you’ll go on to hear an enormous amount about stochasticity! It’ll knock you out and you’ll learn about things we think are awfully amazing that are just random events.

Was the meeting of the girls just a random act or some kind of plan of destiny?

Wonderful Radio
If you’re a radio guy – a lover of fine radio – this hour long show will really please you and you’ll be tickled that you listened.

And then you’ll find yourself making excuses on the days that Radio Lab (or Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me… or A Prairie Home Companion Show) is on the air so you can take a slow, lovely ride in the car while you listen to it.

Well, what about the lady in New Jersey who twice wins major lottery pots? Incredible! Or the one blade of grass out of millions of blades surrounding it that has Tiger’s golf ball land right on top of it? Amazing! (But, it had to happen to some blade of grass, didn’t it? What a spoil-sport!)

I drove along the northwest edge of Hennepin County in my lovely, pleasant automobile and I looked out at the astonishingly beautiful rolling meadows and parkland, dotted by creeks and patches of small lakes and marshes. The sound of the radio played aloud and entertained me and grabbed tightly my attention.

The show faded. A group was singing Stochasticity (a theme song by Judge Kurts and Shane Winter)…

Stochasticity!
Randomness is all you see!
It’s fantastic to be stochastic!
So here’s to stochasticity!

Stoh, stoh, stoh, stoh, stoh, stoh…  unexpectednacity
Stochasticity.. it’s all a part of life you see!
It’s an example of stochasticity…
Non repeated unpredictability it’s called… Stochasticity!

            You can listen to the entire theme song here, on You Tube!

It’s Monday, you know! I like blogging on Mondays cause it's the day after Sunday!

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