Another example: Imagine a long cord that is slightly flexible. At short distance scales, the cord will basically be rigid. If you look at the direction the cord is pointing at two points that are very close together, the cord will likely be pointing in the same direction at those two points (i.e. the angles of the tangent vectors are highly correlated). If you choose two points on this flexible cord (imagine a piece of cooked spaghetti that you've just tossed on your plate) that are very far apart, however, the tangent to the cords at those locations will likely be pointing in different directions (i.e. the angles will be uncorrelated). If you plot out how correlated the tangent angles at two different points are as a function of the distance between the two points, you'll get a plot that starts out at 1 (perfect correlation) at a distance of zero and drops exponentially as distance increases. The persistence length is the characteristic length scale of that exponential decay. For the case of a single molecule of DNA the persistence length can be measured using optical tweezers and atomic force microscopy.