So, I have an ongoing obsession with randomness, that has taken many forms ¹. And one of those forms has been the search for good (read: quick-loading and easy-to-use) random number generators for the purposes of, well, doing random things, like randomized timeboxing (rantim) or page-jumps in a book.

The hack is this: use the millisecond readings on your stopwatch as an RNG.

Need to figure out a timebox but can’t roll a die? Use your stopwatch instead! Need to get  random number between 1 and however number of pages your book has? Again, use your stopwatch instead!

If you can’t get millisecond readings, at least go for centiseconds; that’s really the absolute minimum (and even then, I’d argue it’s not enough). Anything larger and there’s not enough speed or randomness that you can use. Remember, we want as much entropy as possible as quickly as possible, and that virtually always means going small, both physically and temporally. Incidentally, the iOS app WatchStop offers microsecond readings, which is pretty fekken awesome.

So let’s show you how to do this using an actual example:

Example One: Using a Microsecond Stopwatch as a Substitute for Playing Dice

1. Start Timer
2. Stop Timer
3. Stopwatch Reads: XX.976247 seconds
4. We only care about the last digit, the 7.
5. Now, 7 is more than 6. What do you do? Three options:
   • Go back to step 1 and repeat until the timer gives you a final digit between 1 and 6.
   • Divide 7 by 6 and take the remainder, in this case 1. So you do a 1-minute random timebox.
   • Go back up the stack until you find a digit that is less than 6. Just behind the 7 is a 4, and we can use that guy to do a 4-minute timebox.

Example Two: Using a Microsecond Stopwatch to do Random Page Jumps in an eBook

First of all, yes, doing random page jumps like is an example of the legendary swiss-cheesing technique of reading books.

Swiss-cheesing where you attack/consume/drink/binge a book down by putting random “holes” in it. You start reading so many parts from so many different places, so many times that you rapidly “get” the whole — and all much funner, much faster and more reliably than you would if you had simply tried to “scroll” through the book, that is, read it like a scroll or a ticker tape, one page, one word at a time, from top to bottom.

It sounds crazy (that is, if you’ve been brainwashed by school-style reading and/or didn’t have a gigantic home library as a child; otherwise, it probably makes perfect sense to you), but it works like gangbusters! You’re not as stupid as your schooling has taught you to believe. You’re a human being. You(r brain can) fill in the gaps. You don’t need to see all (much less read all) to understand all. Let me, literally, illustrate what I mean:

• Do you really NOT know what this is?
  

  Do you really NOT know what this is?

• Are you really THAT surprised that it’s this?
  

  Are you really THAT surprised that it’s this?

Well, that’s what happens when you swiss-cheese. Yeah, you miss some bits, but you definitely get the idea.

Anyway, enough pre-amble! Let’s get into it!

1. Let’s say you’re reading a 298-page Japanese business book
2. Start Timer
3. Stop Timer
4. The timer reads XX.679594 seconds
5. We can’t take the first last 3 digits because 594 > 298. So we just take the last two and jump to page 94.
6. Start Timer. Stop Timer. The timer reads XX.166944 seconds
7. So we jump to page 44.
8. Start Timer. Stop Timer. The timer reads XX.732921 seconds
9. That’s too many readings where the last three digits ABC > 298. So we start and stop the timer until we get something nice. XX.869242 seconds.
10. Perfect. Jump to page 242.
11. Rinse, repeat!

Again, if you really need a proper random number generator, here’s one right here. Here’s how you use it:

• Set the lower bound at 1
• Set the upper bound at 3500 (yes, three thousand five hundred; no, this is not a typo)
  • Why 3500? Because most books (that I read, at least) are 300-350 pages long. But some are only 100 and others are as big as 1500.
  • So, rather than setting the upper bound to 350, you cap it at 3500.
  • Why? Because:
    • You’re guaranteed to get a good spread of of usable numbers (better than if your upper bound were a round number like 10000).
    • You don’t have to reset the upper bounds for every book.
    • You can use just the first 1-3 digits or the last 1-3 digits of the randomly generated number. You’ve got just enough options to be productive and keep things interesting, but not so many that your time is being wasted.
• Nicholas Dean’s RNG can also be set to automatically produce a new number every X seconds, making it a hands-free proposition, which is awesome.

Anyway, them are the techniques!! Give ’em a go and lemme know! And you have some cool ideas of your own, feel free to share 🙂

Credits:

• Giraffe image analogy idea: Some Japanese business book that I read recently but whose title escapes me. And I honestly can’t be bothered to go find out which one it was but if you know, let me know. It may or may not be this one:
  • [読んだら忘れない読書術 | 樺沢紫苑 |本 | 通販 | Amazon] amzn.to/2EtLEBN
  • And, no, the irony of the title has not escaped me lol 😉
• Image: [File:Giraffe standing.jpg – Wikipedia] goo.gl/qvHmUi
• App: “The Random Number Generator 4 Nicholas Dean” goo.gl/JAit6G
• App: “WatchStop – A Modern Stopwatch 4 Vectre, LLC” goo.gl/HeXyX3