USB Hourglass flips itself, generating random numbers in the process
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted December 22nd 2009 12:52PM
posted December 22nd 2009 12:52PM
This is such a bizarre combination of the old and the new that at least a few of our geekiest readers are sure to get a kick out of it. The USB Hourglass is essentially an egg timer equipped with an optical beam for keeping an eye on sand levels and a rotating mechanism for flipping the thing when all the sand has landed at the bottom. But that ain't all! The observed light levels are sent to a host PC (via USB, which also supplies power) where any of your favorite open source tools can use it to generate random numbers. The rest of this -- "entropy," "random" versus "pseudorandom" number generators, etc. -- is simply a little beyond us this morning, although we're sure that this will produce a lively and intelligent discussion in the comments (where many a lively and intelligent discussion has taken place over the years). Just make sure you peep the video after the break first -- it's a blast.
See more video at our hub!
Is anything truly random?
@Spiraling Shape Not if everything in the universe can be measured
@Spiraling Shape
Yes. this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI-pct3zy18
@revelationnow
Which is where Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle comes in to play...
@Spiraling Shape
No, put for humans we don'f fully understand the universe, and in such we can generate numbers of disparate meanings (to us humans), what we call Random.
@martynmcfarquhar This is why i don't like quantum mechanics, i have to agree with Einstein in this one "God does not play dice".
@Spiraling Shape
"Is anything truly random?"
Only if things are ever truly 'ordered'...
Stared at the video in disbelief that it actually made me watch the sand go down the glass all the way just to see how the thing flips.
That's practical.
I would love one of these for my desk!
i guess i can replace my current random generator now
http://xkcd.com/221/
@phokat damn you
Why?
@RedWingsFan
For the pure Rube Goldberg fun of it.
@bjs
You are nicer than I am.
@RedWingsFan
You really should consider the number of derogatory combinations there are of "hockey fan" and unkind words for "unimaginative and statistically likely to have incurred repeated head trauma" before attempting to detract from your betters.
Surely it's easier just to use white noise, like they've been doing for decades?
@Twirrim
Yeah, but this is just quirky and cool :p
Shove an iPod dock into it and it will be perfect!
I should have seen this BEFORE I bought my MegaMillions ticket today. I used to have numbered pingpong balls, and let my cats pick my Lotto numbers. Very scientific, and random.
"just because we could" ?
I guess I'm too high to understand what I just watched.
did that video really need to go on and on and on for 3 1/2 minutes?
Here is a nice writeup on a another homebrew random number generator. Doesnt fit on your desk, though
http://gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic
In a random number generation function, I'd use a mixture of the current mouse position, the current cpu usage, and the current time. That would be really unpredictable. You could also use the last key that was pressed or the amount of ram being used, or get variables from the web, such as some letters from the most recent Twitter post.
@geckojsc
The problem is that it would never be truly random. Although very very very hard to find out, it is still generating the number based on some algorithm (albeit very complicated).
@geckojsc
That is simply not "random". It is entirely dependent on the factors you mention in your own post. A number based directly on other variable factors such as these can never be random.
@FORDY therefore by your own account you claim that there can be nothing random
and i agree.
the only thing i will call random is neuron firing in a baby.
I think I have come to the mind that there is no such thing as a random number and if we find one it might prove the existence of god.
Maybe a human can pick a random number?
Then.... maybe we are god??
I'm not sure... which seems to indicate that at least I am not a god.
@savagemike
Well, if you think about it, if God just came to be (or simply "always is and always has been," which basically means: just came to be), as most who argue the point would argue, then technically HE is random. His very existence is random, so everything he does is based in randomness, so everything is random, if you trace it back to its origin. Or so my rather tired brain would have me believe.
You wanna know what's random? The 70's porno/elevator music. Seriously? Wtf?
The problem I see with this is that it would only give you a random number within a certain range. Unless you were doing it based on the one column in the number (so in 13 it would be 3. I know there's a word for that, and it's not one column, but I can't think of it at the moment) of seconds that had passed, and you only needed to generate numbers 0-9. Otherwise you'd be getting 33, 34, 35, 33, 37, 32, or something to that extent.
And of course there's the fact that there isn't really anything that's random. Randomness is similar to the God of the Gaps. In the same way that primitive societies claim God to be behind natural forces that they don't understand, we claim randomness to be behind numbers that we don't know how they were generated (or other "random" phenomena).