A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

For those of us without a two week vacation to devote to this tome, I would like to see a Clif's Notes version. Maybe 10,000 random numbers? SPOILER ALERT: They just pretty much stay random the whole time, no plot twists or anything. I mean if you've seen one random number, you've seen them all. In a slap in the face of randomness, the very randomness of it got repetitive after a few pages. Save yourself the time, and if you need a random number, just sort of think of a random number in your head and write it down. Odds are its in the book already, and you saved yourself $80. On the plus side, great comments. Please read my upcoming meta-pop-economics book, "Absurdity, Humor, and Metacommentary in Current Anonymous Internet Communication, A Case Study: Literary Criticism of the Amazon.com Comments Section for the Book 'A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates' by the Rand Corporation." Coming soon to Amazon.com.

I can't understand all the negative reviews! This book literally contains everything I could ever ask for in a book. Recipe for spanokopita? Check! Name of every person ever born? Check! Next week's powerball, bingo, MLB, and NASCAR results? Check! By randomly combining and recombining the contents at random, I have read the works of Shakespeare, Harry Potter 8: the Tomb of Crying Stilton (to be released in 2014), the Bible AND the REAL Bible. I threw out my other books when I realized I could just jump around in this book and derive any other book I wanted. I think Borges wrote a story about this, but it's taking me a while to find that story in my book. I did find some steamy erotica this morning, though, so who's complaining?

I have 2 perspectives on this book: 1) The story is derivative and uninspired. The story either repeats itself or just mixes up the previous chapters. Not cool! I even found that there are large chunks of story directly lifted from other works. Notably my "1 million digits of Pi" bedroom poster. Yes, that's right, parts of this book are stolen from copyrighted material! Although, as that work was created ~13.7 billion years ago, I'm not sure if the copyright still stands? We may have to check with the late creators estate on the current status. 2) The book is a work of genius possibly used to relay secret government messages about the lies of global warming. I thought I could see a hidden message in the book and I found I was RIGHT! As I read the book I noticed something, the number 23 appeared all the way through the book and, as you know, that means the New World Order have something to do with this book. Not only was it hidden in some of the numbers it was actually there in full, in plain sight, over and over. You may think that's a dead giveaway to the conspiracy, and not genius to leave such conspiracy information in plain view of all, however it was just a misdirection. What I found out next was SHOCKING! I took all the digits in the book and plotted them into a planar graph (odd that the numbers required "PLOTTING", it confirms what I'm saying even more!). At first there was nothing, so I took the numbers and did some work on them. First I multiplied every third number by 23 (THEIR code number) and added the resulting digits together from each result and continued to do so until they were all single digits. Then I ran the other numbers through a multi-dimensional kaleidoscopic fractional algorithm and converted the numbers to base 18.5 which took further multi-dimensional refactoring. They really have hidden this message deep! Once I had my numbers I knew I was close. I printed them ALL out one by one on A3 paper, global warming is a lie so I didn't have to worry about the environmental impact of that, and arranged them in a horizontally polarised alphabetical order, positioning them using my dousing rods, in a secret salt flat in the Nevada desert (I like to watch this salt flat on a daily basis). Once they were arranged I borrowed a helicopter I found nearby (I say helicopter, but it was either a disk or cigar shape, depending on speed, and seemed to fly by glowing and humming without propellers) and what did I see from above? Only the words: "This is a lie... This is a lie". And guess what you get if you add up all the characters not including spaces? That's right... 23! And that Pi poster I mentioned earlier? I get EXACTLY THE SAME RESULT! QED

They sure don't come up with random numbers like they used to. If you look closely, you will note that every tenth digit or so is just a repeat of the last digit and every hundredth or so is a just the same digit repeated three times. How sloppy! A sampling of this "work": Page 36 - Line 6 - 15 characters in should be 5, not 4. Page 99 - Line 18 - first three characters should be "453" not "345". Page 145 - Line 2 - 7th and 19th characters transposed. Page 190 - Whole line of numbers omitted betwen 6th and 7th lines. Pages 210 and 211 - Two sections appear quasi-randomized, instead of randomized. Also, if you stare at it long enough, you can decode something around page 300 about Jody Foster and J.D. Salinger giving me some sort of instructions. I'm going to stay up another couple nights staring at this to see if I can make out anything further. *********** Post-Script: After a couple of weeks of studying this book, I set it down and let it be for a while. However, something kept nagging at me - something I couldn't put my finger on. I knew that I had seen all this somewhere before, I just couldn't place it... I was thinking Dan Brown, but I think the Di Vinci Code had something to do with painting or the Vatican or something like that. Maybe that Oprah Book Club guy who got caught lying, but that was kinda a different thing too. I let it go, but it just kept eating at me. I knew I had seen it before, I just knew it. About a month later, I decided to bring the book along to the Rhode Island coast so that I'd have something to thumb through on the beach. As I battled livered kelp from between my toes with the murmur of low tide brushing the pebbled shore on the wind, a revelation hit me between the eyes like a Mack truck into a kindergarten. "WAIT A MINUTE!" I literally jumped out of my fold-away beach lounger: "This is just a straight copy of a string of digits appearing in pi!" Sure enough somewhere in the first 10^(10^7) or so digits of pi, there it was. The authors (if you can call them that) had just cut-and-pasted straight out of the original work! Since then, I've been writing increasingly vitriolic communiqués to the Rand Corporation daily trying to get them to admit to their fraud, but as of yet have had no response.

Very interesting, starts off slow but picks up and is great until the end, which doesn’t match up.

A very engrossing book with historical importance, it keeps you guessing until the end.

Absolutely fabulous!! It is really made of pages and pages full of random numbers! Reading this gives you the feeling of the beauty of random, and how big a million is. Wonderfully and deeply useless!

Unique book. Can be read endlessly for help against the darkness. Random is not careless! I searched it many times and it never failed me. More! More! More!

You don’t have to read this in order! If you want a random digit, you can open it to any page and point. Fun game: search the second half of the book for pages that have normal variates greater than 3.0 or less than -3.0! Hours of fun. Bonus: use the Extreme Normal Distribution (or the Gumble approximation) to figure out the expected number of such pages!

This is an amazing book: go and check out its history on the web! This is a very good deal, because despite the claim in the title, the book is 400 pages each filled with 50 digits: you actually get 2 million random digits at the price of 1 million. Every now and then, you have the feeling to read something that you've already bumped into, but that's a minor issue; the plot still holds and it's truly unpredictable. Spoiler Alert: it ends on 41998. You should read it anyway, as you'll never guess how you get there!