Pseudo-randomness

In the second batch of sere, yellowed piles of flammable information ripped from the New York Times, I was surprised to find an article on the creation of deliberately random numbers. Random numbers naturally do not behave as if they believed they were random numbers. They are just as imprecatory as bank balances. I'd rather not know how one arrives at numbers, nor watch an autopsy. Numbers have far too much power and if you ask me, they can go screw themselves.

******"A sociologist or a statistician surveying a random sample of the public, a biologist analyzing the mercurial spread of a disease or the growth of a population, a psychologist studying whether an avowed clairvoyant can guess the identities of hidden cards with a success rate better than chance -- all need random numbers to calculate the uncertain outcomes of processes that can only be described using probability. ''The world consists of the tension between order and chaos,'' said Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician at the I.B.M. Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. ''When simulating physical phenomena, order is supplied by the laws of physics and chaos is supplied by random numbers.''
Before high-speed digital computers were invented, mathematicians compiled tables of random numbers by blindly flipping through phone books, casting dice, spinning spinners or drawing cards from a hat. As automation came of age, the RAND Corporation used a kind of electronic roulette wheel to generate a classic work, published in 1955, called ''A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates.'' The seemingly oxymoronic term ''normal deviates'' (random numbers whose occurrence can be plotted on a bell-shaped curve) inspired the New York Public Library to shelve the book in the psychology section.
But as science's demand for random numbers continued to grow, even the longest tables were quickly exhausted. A way was needed to produce torrents of random numbers on the fly, and nothing could spit out digits faster than a digital computer.
Therein lay the paradox: how to use order to generate disorder. The best that could be hoped for, it seemed, was pseudorandomness -- numbers that, though produced by a completely deterministic and repeatable process, appear to be patternless.

and some other apparently random interests:

*****An article on an Italian psychologist studying what she calls the "Stendhal syndrome" an over-reaction to art- occasionally even fainting as Stendhal did in Florence in 1817

*****on vagrants:
"The civil war gave vagrancy its first big boost- its immediate effect was to accustom a generation of men to riding in trains, camping out and foraging for food. The word 'tramp' originally described a military foraging expedition, a 'bum' was a soldier who foraged too enthusiastically."

*****Easily disposable articles on Webb Hubbell, the hunched, bloated, droopy-lipped law partner of Hillary Clinton who reached a plea agreement with Kenneth Starr. Also the transcript of Bill Clinton's affadavit.

*****An obituary on Richard Moon, the inventor of the first three digits of the zip code or Zoning Improvement Code (est. 1963)