TRULY random, none of this...

Have you ever wondered how a computer is programmed to generate a random number? It's not. You cannot program a computer to generate a random number. It is simply too predictable. All 1s or 0s (or shorts, if you wire it wrong). A computer is designed to follow instructions perfectly, so even if your computer is totally messed up beyond all shadow of working, it's still predictable. That's just how it works.

Shadow already knows all this, right?

BUT>>>>

True Random Number Generators.

[Random.org]

[HotBits]

[lavaRND]

Now under this last link, there are two very interesting demos. One is a "LavaRND Haiku", essentially random poetry generator. I was strongly encouraged to show this to E____, who is highly involved in poetry. The other is "LavaRND CorpSpeak", a Dilbert-like management memo generator. And you can read all about how these are both generated by a TRULY random process. None of these computer algorithms...

Where p0liticians come from

And this morning, Andrew and I were discussing--of all things to discuss in the morning--infinity and rational numbers. The comment was that two of my sisters spend all of their free time on the computer. No, every irrational portion of every second of spare time. So then I started thinking, what is the ratio of rational numbers to irrational numbers between 0 and 1? There are infinite rational numbers between 0 and 1. Between every two rational numbers, there are infinite irrational numbers. So the ratio of rational to irrational numbers is infinity over infinity. That region of irrational number between two rational numbers... that's where politicians come from. So.... Infinity over infinity is equal to Hillary Clinton. :-)

-Petr