flipism on radio

Nils Lid Hjort nils at math.uio.no
Thu Mar 1 22:41:37 CET 2001


I was interviewed some days ago by "Radio Nova" in Oslo,
after my "popular science" lecture at the University of Oslo
about mathematics in Duckburg. This resulted in a ten minute
report/interview/montage, which was aired on Monday (?). 
I didn't have a chance to listen to this myself, but I 
was curious to understand that the reporter, after our 
conversation, had made a "dramatisation" of the "flipism" topic.

In my lecture I spent a couple of minutes on the "flipism" 
(WD 149, 1953), and noted that it preceded "The Dice Man"
of Luke Rhinehart Jr. (1971) ["If that die has a one faced up,
I'm going downstairs to rape Arlene", etc. etc.]. 
I also pointed out that a random walk process on a two-dimensional
grid is recurrent, that is, the probability of Donald sooner
or later encountering the precise address of the author
of the ill-fated book on flipism, or, for that matter, the 
precise location of April-May-June, is actually 1. 

Nils Lid Hjort 



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