Markov chains are one of those things which I have an unreasonable fascination. They're such a powerful concept and are continuing to become even more and more impactful. Awesome stuff.
I swear Hacker/Innocuous News is following the programming languages class I'm currently taking. In the last week we've gone over tail recursion and the Markov model and in the last 12 hours they've both made appearances on the front page.
I was once explaining the Baader-Meinhof Phenomoenon to someone and then went to a movie and there was a trailer for a movie about the Baader-Meinhof gang.
I'm taking statistics at the moment too, actually. I understand what you're saying. I was simply remarking on the pleasantness of seeing a correlation between my academic material and real-world applications.
I guess s/he will realize this not in Statistics class, but in Psychology class. Human brain is amazingly equipped to find patterns, even if there exists none.
Cool stuff. I just used Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Relevance Vector Machines (RVM) to separate explosives from non-explosives. Worked amazingly well.