Users complained that shuffle sometimes played two songs by the same artist back to back, proof, they felt, that it was rigged. Yet that was genuine randomness, which naturally produces clusters. So in 2014 Spotify switched to an algorithm that deliberately spreads out each artist's tracks. To look random to human eyes, randomness has to be tweaked a little.
How many different structures can you build with six classic 2-by-4 Lego bricks of the same colour? The company used to quote just over 102 million. In 2005, Danish mathematician Søren Eilers recounted everything by computer: 915,103,765 combinations. The official estimate had been too low by a factor of about nine.
Fold an A4 sheet in half and you get an A5 with the same proportions. That only works for one ratio between length and width: about 1.414, the square root of 2. The A0 format measures exactly one square metre, and A4 is a sixteenth of it. With standard 80-gram-per-square-metre paper, an A4 sheet therefore weighs exactly 5 grams.