Humans are hoarders. Collectosapiens. Stamps, train numbers, bird songs, you name it — if something exists, then there is a collection of it. Yet despite knowing that, I felt a spike of joyful surprise upon hearing this sentence: “We also collect randomness around the world.”
Collections and randomness make for an unlikely pairing. Collections tend to be carefully ordered, otherwise you just have a big pile of stuff; Randomness, by its nature, is chaotic. Hearing about such a marriage sparks up any number of questions.
The most obvious question is: why do such a thing? As Tom Scott explains much of our online security depends on randomness which, unfortunately, is not easily conjured up by computers. Bless their little cotton motherboards. Hence we humans — messy from birth — have to give them a hand.
For me, though, just as interesting is: how does one collect randomness?
Cloudfare — the self-proclaimed chaos collectors — have a number of examples, most hilarious of which is a wall filled with lava lamps. At any one moment, taking picture of this 70s wall guarantees a completely unpredictable — and therefore ‘random’ — set of pixels. These pixels can then be turned into data.
Which got me thinking, what other sources of chaos are there? The obvious one is the global weather system. But, if we’re going down this route, how about finding some added perks. For example: footage from a thousand bee colonies kept around the globe. Not only will this create random data, but it has the bonus effect of helping the world.
And what a wonderful world it is, when there are people out there who are dutifully collecting randomness.