Random the Book

When writing a book on a wide-ranging concept like randomness, where should I, Nick Drage, draw the lines around what is and isn’t relevant to the work? This is a challenge, especially when such a major part of thinking about randomness is thinking about apophenia. Apophenia is our natural ability to see patterns in information, but when your subject matter includes so many possibilities; I’m finding it’s key to separate relevant connections from irrelevant ones.¹

So I’m more attuned to coincidences now, and even if they’re not relevant, they’re just interesting. For example:

For my personal overthought and overwrought “magnum opus” I occasionally fall down folklore rabbit holes. So thanks to a social media algorithm, Instagram I think, I first learnt about a mythological race of Dwarves from Hawaiian culture, the Menehune, only a week or so ago.

Only a few days later, myself and Matt were discussing where randomness is an essential part of technology. With my background in IT the concept of random ‘backoffs’ in communication mediums came up. If two computers are trying to use the same medium at the same time, for example a WiFi network, neither will “hear” the other, but they’ll know there’s an issue with sending the message – so they stop transmitting². But their message needs to be sent, how do they know when to try again? How do they avoid just repeatedly talking over each other, resulting in neither being able to send a message?

The answer is randomly backing off, so by chance one will start and finish its message before the other computer tries ago. This technique originated in Hawaii, within a University wireless network called ALOHAnet. And the name of the essential “central node” for ALOHAnet?

The “Menehune”³.

1. I think it’s also important to spot when others have that ability… but that’s a discussion for another time. ↩︎
2. Yes, similarly technical person who’s reading this – in practice it is a lot more complicated. Let’s see how well I explain that in the book. ↩︎
3. A Menehune Bank is the lead picture for this post. The picture is by Laudowicz – Took the picture in an Antique Shop in Honolulu – Previously published: http://www.astuterecorder.com/phillip_roberts/2009/july/postcards-from-paradise-rainbow-drive-in-pali-and-pork.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20436830 ↩︎