Psyleron sells a hardware random number generator and associated software package for experimentation on the interaction of consciousness and randomness. No, don’t laugh. Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research conducted decades of methodologically rigorous research into the nature of randomness. They concluded that deliberate conscious intention can produce a small but statistically significant and reproducible effect on the outcome of stochastic processes. Psyleron is a commercial offshoot of PEAR.
The Psyleron system, unfortunately, costs hundreds of dollars and only runs on Windows, so I wrote some quick Clojure to do experimentation with randomness, using /dev/random as the source. (It appears that /dev/random on Mac OS X does not provide the same quality guarantees as it does on Linux, but it’s fine for a prototype and the implementation allows easy substitution of another randomness source later.) Continue Reading »
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Posted in Tech | 
1 Comment » | April 22nd, 2010
