Yesterday my washer was perfectly in synch with a Sonic Youth song. You know how sometimes you're driving, and you look down to find your blinker is in synch with the car in front of you, only slowly you realize that they're not. It was just close enough to fool you and eventually they become 180 degrees out of phase, you're the downbeat now, and they're the backbeat.
Well this is what I expected to happen to my washer and Sonic Youth. Only it didn't. They were in synch for the duration of the song. Now what are the chances of that?
About 1 in 2500 actually. It was a four minute song and let's say the beat was twice a second. So there were about 500 total beats in the song. The phase difference at the beginning would therefore be 500 times greater by the end of the song, and suppose I would have noticed at the end if they were off by even a tenth of a second. This means the initial phase difference was less than 1/5000. Since the song could have started anywhere in the .5 second interval between washer beats, but instead randomly started in the first 1/5000th of a second interval after a washer beat, the chances of this happening are 1/2500. Man maybe I should have posted this to my other blog? Hee hee.
Posted by Alan at January 10, 2004 08:16 PM