you're like a messiah, pal*
nerd alert of the day:
Back in the '50s, the RAND corporation published a book called A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. Its sole purpose was to be a source of random numbers for computing and mathematics, which is actually quite hard to do. No pattern anywhere. The pride of this book is that it is statistically meaningless. Quite zen.
book review here.
*title taken from the first line of a song "randomly" chosen by windows media player on shuffle. The song is "almost crimes" by broken social scene and I could not understand the first line. Intense google searching gave unsatisfactory and contradictory results. This is the most popular result, though clearly not correct (there is definitely a hard consonant sound at the end of the line). The only other reasonable option was "you're like the missile kind" which has the consonant but is absurd and doesn't sound right, either. Any better suggestions?
and now my aside is longer than the original post.
Back in the '50s, the RAND corporation published a book called A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. Its sole purpose was to be a source of random numbers for computing and mathematics, which is actually quite hard to do. No pattern anywhere. The pride of this book is that it is statistically meaningless. Quite zen.
book review here.
*title taken from the first line of a song "randomly" chosen by windows media player on shuffle. The song is "almost crimes" by broken social scene and I could not understand the first line. Intense google searching gave unsatisfactory and contradictory results. This is the most popular result, though clearly not correct (there is definitely a hard consonant sound at the end of the line). The only other reasonable option was "you're like the missile kind" which has the consonant but is absurd and doesn't sound right, either. Any better suggestions?
and now my aside is longer than the original post.
random bits cobbled together by j-dub
3 Comments:
how very monte carlo.
in college, for the hardest class i ever took, innoculously titled "measurements laboratory," we had an assignment that went like this:
we got a disk with two huge files of numbers. (like ten thousand numbers in each or something.) determine which is random and which is not, and write a lab report on it.
probably wouldn't seem hard now, but that was before we knew how to do such things. the teacher was proud that he didn't teach, he only answered questions. "any questions? ok, class dismissed."
i remember two friends getting into a fight while working on this one. ahhh, the memories...
Broken Social Scene's myspace page lists the lyrics as "You're like a messiah, pal"...I'd guess if anybody knows the lyrics, it would be the band.
I still stand by my statement that he doesn't say "pal", or if he meant to he flubbed it.
I once heard REM frontman Michael Stipe fully admit he didn't know the specific lyrics to many of their songs, especially "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I feel Fine)."
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