Random blurbs

In information science and communication theory, randomness or noise is often described as irrelevant, meaningless data. A fairly simple description, but it raises interesting questions. What is meaningless, and what do you mean by irrelevant? Being absolutely no stranger to alcohol and what it can do to the human brain - ranging from making you put your (double) tongue into a completely stranger's mouth to having a groundbreaking insight of cosmic proportions, I feel rather tempted to wave this description away as absolute nonsense. But then again, what is randomness?

I was being confronted with this rather erhm... irrelevant issue a few days ago, during my last lecture for biologists. I had to write down something arbitrarily on the blackboard, but the harder I tried to generate random numbers, the more I realized how non-random my example actually became. And I guess we all have the same reflex with respect to these matters: so-called random number sequences cannot have too many repetitions, and should not include obvious combinations like 1234 or 666, isn't it? But where does that leave you?

I mean, does the following sequence look random to you?

3064464030121369

Probably not, right? Very correct, you might have recognized the conjectured dimension of a module associated with the free commutative Moufang loop with 23 generators. Anyway, my point being that sometimes it is difficult to believe that things are just random. And this applies to real life as well, as we (Fred and myself) once again experienced this weekend: our flight from Prague to Brussels was delayed, and this lead to missing the last train from the airport back to Ghent. By two lousy minutes, I guess delayed trains are never to your advantage. However, we did realize that there was a tiny chance that we could get home, taking a taxi from the airport to the Central train station in Brussels where we might still catch the train coming from the airport. In poker lingo: the backdoor flush draw to the nuts.

And guess what, on our way to the official taxi stand - where you are supposed to queue and wait for a yellow cab - we bumped into a shady driver addressing us with a coincidental "Voulez vous un taxi?". For exactly one nano-second, which is more or less the time it takes an average person to notice that the word 'Eyjafjallajokull' contains a spelling mistake, we felt a bit uneasy. Was this not too fishy? One exchanged look later, a classical "I don't know about you but I am fucking tired and need a bed"-look, we decided to go for it and roll the coaster. Which is not just a funny way of putting it: apart from loops, it really felt like a roller coaster ride. With one hand underneath his seat, "Damned, where's my fucking telephone?", our taxi driver zigzagged us through the city and delivered us to our (almost) final destination in (no) time where we safely boarded our train. There was even enough time left for a snack from a vending machine, and the realization that Brussels central station is where randomly weird people meet on a Sunday evening.

And then again, when are people considered to be weird?