Random walks lead us to the Mountains of Snormals, where we contemplate boredom, universality, and beauty. But they are also a source of strange scaling and statistical structure. We outline the random walk first return problem for a zombie texter. Our disoriented former friend will definitely return but we can expect to wait forever (still: be prepared; double tap). We jump into some geomorphology and find that theoretical random walk shapes in river networks and basins give us an opening into scaling relations. For some bonus examples, we touch on death by randomness, basketball, fractional walks, and how dollar bills move around.

2018/09/14

1:33:36