I have, up until this point, found no reason to partake in the latest online craze – Facebook’s 25 Random Things About You. It’s simply an online chain letter that involves sharing 25 ‘random’ facts about yourself with the Facebook community, which has made me wonder not about the hundreds of facts I’ve been reading about people, but about the very nature of randomness itself. And before I get too existential I now present:
25 Random Things. Literally.
- iPod Shuffle
- Roulette
- Not Natural Selection
- Door prizes
- Chaos theory
- Schrödinger’s cat
- Tony Abbot
- People who sneeze in multiples
- Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky
- Wikipedia’s Random Articles
- Picking a card, any card
- How To Be Random
- Flash mobs (about 4 years ago)
- X: Ω → Y (an equation for a random variable in a measurable space)
- Pseudo-random numbers
- Random Cats
- Computer RAM (Random-access memory)
- Lady Sovereign
- Some acts of kindness
- Some drug tests
- Dice
- True Random Number Generator
- Random password generator
- The Emo Band-Name Generator
- Radioactive decay
This would have to be my favourite ironic response to a current trend today.
I don’t believe that Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky is random at all. It is the first page that comes up in your search, that’s all. Sorry. I should probably know better than to take a swing at a writer’s ego.
Ah, you are so right. I am humbled and discredited 🙂