randomness

n. 1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. 2. A hack or crock
that depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or, possibly, the
combination upon which the crock depends for its accidental failure to
malfunction). This hack can output characters 40--57 by putting the
character in the four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting
six bits the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing. What
randomness! 3. Of people, synonymous with flakiness. The connotation is that
the person so described is behaving weirdly, incompetently, or
inappropriately for reasons which are (a) too tiresome to bother inquiring
into, (b) are probably as inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c)
are likely to pass with time. Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's
just randomness. See if he calls back. Despite the negative connotations of
most jargon uses of this term have, it is worth noting that randomness can
actually be a valuable resource, very useful for applications in
cryptography and elsewhere. Computers are so thoroughly deterministic that
they have a hard time generating high-quality randomness, so hackers have
sometimes felt the need to built special-purpose contraptions for this
purpose alone. One well-known website offers random bits generated by
radioactive decay. Another derives random bits from chaotic systems in
analog electronics. Originally, the latter site got its random bits by doing
photometry on lava lamps. Hackers invariably found this hilarious. If you
have to ask why, you'll never get it.

