Every now and then all humans get the craving for randomness. But randomness is hard to come by. Here’s a book to fulfill all your random needs. A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates!

A friend and colleague of mine, Freysteinn (yes, that’s another unpronounceable Icelandic name) pointed it out to me today. It’s a book filled with sequences of random digits. Just like the title says. Page after page of random numbers. Haha. I’m seriously considering ordering it — it’s so cool. Take a look inside the book. One of the comments left a reviewer is so hilarious that I feel compelled to post it. It’s by a Mr. Jamie R. Wilson:

A truly amazing genre-breaking work of art unlike any that has ever
been or ever will. I was captivated from the moment I opened the cover until the extremely suspenseful moment I turned the last page. Withthat said, I was a little disappointed that 71602 was knocked off by 92937 just as the plot was unfolding, but the arrival of 96240 really got my blood pumping and I just couldn’t put the book down from that moment on.

I am so glad that Amazon.com is offering the "Search Inside This Book" option for this book so that it can be enjoyed by countless other avid readers who otherwise may not have come across it. I wait, impatiently, for the audio CD version of this fine book.

Randomness is an interesting subject, as we can’t be entirely sure whether there is such a thing as true randomness. I think the closest we’ve come to exploring it is in quantum mechanics, Wikipedia has an example:

An example of such an experiment is placing a single unstable atom in a controlled environment; it cannot be predicted how long it will take
for the atom to decay; only the probability of decay within a given time can be calculated.

I have a very hard time envisioning how a non-deterministic phenomena works — obviously, as that would mean no causation, no chain of events to trace and thereby make sense of. It would also seem strange that everything but the lowest level components of our Universe are not random — and by strange I mean inconsistent. I remain indecisive until further notice on the issue. Fascinating concept nonetheless.