Listening to Lord Bragg and his guests discussing random and pseudorandom numbers taught me a thing or two, and raised a couple of “issues”. One, trivial, can be dismissed at once: why was there no discussion of the amazing prescience of the shuffle function on so many people’s iPods? Because it interests no-one except the iPod listener. Trickier was the way the various guests seemed to skirt around the predestination issue. In answer to the general question of whether, if you knew all the existing preconditions of a coin-toss, you could predict the outcome, the answer seemed to be a less than convincing “Well, you can never really know all the preconditions.”

OK, but ...

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Deep philosophical musings have once again been prompted by a reader, who complains of losing the way when following links from my posts. They open in the same window, and lead to distractions that move further and further away, and then they realize they can’t get back to where they started, right...

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Screenshot of a theodolite app

Theodolite is one of those things that makes me wish I had a use for it. And an iPhone to use it on.

16 February 2020: I do, and I have, now. Which might prove useful.

I may regret this, but having learned to spread little goodies to followers through Google Reader, I thought I would send them back here to The Mother Ship. Over there, below the Random Photograph. To do that, however, I have to make them available to all and sundry, rather than just to my friends a...

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The 8pen: Writing fast on small devices.

I watched the video, and as someone who learned Graffiti on a Palm, it seems to me that this could fly. Wonder when it might be available for my non-Android non-i phone.

2021-11-03: Dead and gone; just a flash in the 8pen?