On 8 Mar 00, at 15:29, Henrik Olsen wrote:
> finding factors only seems to come in cluster, but the other two does
> haver mechanisms that does make them actually cluster up.
I was using "random" in a loose sense, in the sense that I'd loosely
refer to the digits of the decimal expansion of pi as being random.
They may indeed pass all known tests for random sequences, but
nevertheless form a very definitely non-random sequence.
(a) I think I've mentioned the theory of bus clumping on this list
before.
(b) It's more than likely that aircraft accidents seem to be more
densely clustered than they really are. In the wake of a major
disaster, any minor incident involving the same operator or aircraft
type is likely to be reported, whereas normally the media might not
be interested in an incident causing very little damage and no
casualties.
In fact you can bet that, once a fault comes to light (whether caused
by design, maintainance or operator error), extra checks are put in
place very quickly. My guess is that the DC9/DC80/Boeing 717 family
probably have the _safest_ horizontal stabilizer systems in the air
at the moment, following the recent loss of the Alaskan aircraft off
California.
(c) the fact that we can't predict beforehand which Mersenne numbers
yield easily to trial factoring doesn't mean that there isn't a non-
random mechanism in effect. It might be that we're too dumb to have
found it yet!
Regards
Brian Beesley
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