you're sposed to flip to a random page

But then you're doing the work!

Actually, you can't flip to a random page, because of the nature of book bindings. You're much more likely to flip to the dead middle than to pages on the extremes, and over time the binding becomes creased and naturally opens to specific sections

Like the book, it's a fixed set, and becomes semi-unrandom.

It's fixed, but it's infinitely long so you can always just move down to an as yet unused stretch of randomosity. Like the Mad Hatter's tea party.

If even computers can't really create strings of random numbers, is it even possible to create long strings of truly random numbers?

Sean is forcing me to air the dirty laundry. The Rand numbers (from the book) were generated by computers with lots of arcane (and probably irrelvant) steps to ensure that they are really random. It turns out that you need more than a million numbers to prove that an almost random sequence is not truly random , so the Rand numbers are pretty well safe from falsification. Number sequences from PCs are not. People have just given up and started calling them pseudo-random sequences. Good enough.

Of course, I'm a psychologist, so even the things I'm trying to measure systematically turn out to be pretty close to random much of the time. It's really only and issue in sciences that have, uh, made more progress than we have.

What if you rip the pages out of the binding and throw them up into the air a whole bunch of times?

Are we random yet?

Are we?

Are we?

What if you rip the pages out of the binding and throw them up into the air a whole bunch of times?

All the physicists come down the hall and snigger.

I always thought you used the book of random numbers kind of like an I Ching - you flipped a coin or rolled a die or something to choose the page and row and column and used the resulting number.

But I've never had to use it, so I don't actually know.

Are we?

Throw a cat and a toddler into the mix. That should guarantee it.

I think some of the people praying for the Pope are probably praying that his last hours are peaceful ones, rather than that he miraculously get better. Though I'm sure some people are asking for both.

To me, the funniest thing about the Pope's passing is the Vatican announcements that refer to him as the Holy Father. It's just somehow ... disconcerting ... to read, "the Holy Father's blood pressure is dropping rapidly, and he is still recieving antibiotic therapy." Kind of like "the Commander in Chief cholked on a pretzel."

All the physicists come down the hall and snigger.

They're all going to mutate and die from their radioactive randomosity, so who cares?

Today is not a good day to be vertiginous. I swear I've never had more than a five minute phone convo with my boss before today -- so of course today it's to do with something she's had forwarded to her by both me and her boss, and I have to read emails and attachments and sound intelligent.

I need to barf. And that was inbetween two other conference calls, which luckily didn't require intelligence.

And then I promptly promised to forward her something, and forwarded it to myself instead. Took me TEN minutes to work out what the weirdness in my inbox meant.

Sadly and happily, this is better than three hours ago.