Poor Schroedinger's pope.

Once they're published in book form, where anybody can look up the srting, which would now be in the same order every time you looked, aren't they no longer random?

Yes, it's only random within your experiment. If you were to start correlating, say, the results you got with the results someone else got from their random sequence, you would have to check to see that you took your numbers from a different page.

These days, any PC can generate a million random digits in a millisecond. But every few years someone proves that these sequences are not really random, even though they are so close to random that it doesn't matter for anything other than high-level physics. So the book is the 'safe' choice.

you're sposed to flip to a random page.

Doesn't even this stop working after a while? After the spine's been worn in a little, the book would start to fall open to the same pages more often than not. (If it's like other books, the really dirty pages.)

Then a man said "I'm praying to God that he'll get just a little longer with us."

Is there even any point to praying on behalf of a Pope? Since he's supposed to have a direct line and all?

Schroedinger's pope

I truly love that line.

edit: It's a crying shame that 99.9% of the people who get the joke live in this little box on my desk and not in the same portion of the meat world where I live.

So the book is the 'safe' choice.

Now wondering how the book was made. Perhaps the "author" shook a 10-sided die 1,000,000 times (assuming 0 counts). What a boring way to make back your advance!

Is there even any point to praying on behalf of a Pope? Since he's supposed to have a direct line and all?

Eh, he's an old man. Giving him a boost up is the polite thing to do.

Wait, what? You're not going to get into every detail of your family life with thousands of strangers on the internet? That's just wack, man.

I know, I know. I'm a traditionalist. I'm going to publish a book about it instead.

Between the spam label and the pope riddles and shell games, my brain is threatening a walkout.

Is there even any point to praying on behalf of a Pope? Since he's supposed to have a direct line and all?

If only God could know that LOTS AND LOTS of people want the Pope to keep living....

But every few years someone proves that these sequences are not really random, even though they are so close to random that it doesn't matter for anything other than high-level physics.

Which leads me to yet another mathy-ignorant question:

If even computers can't really create strings of random numbers, is it even possible to create long strings of truly random numbers? One presumes that people just rattling off digits is even less reliably random than a computer doing it.