Went to a talk about Monte Carlo methods at MIT sometime before 1955. A rack full of equipment and a scintillation counter (maybe two) generated the randomness. Have three big scintillation counters available cheap, if you like vacuum tubes.
Picked up a Grason Stadler noise generator some time ago. A 6D4 gas thyratron and magnets produce white noise out to about a megacycle. See http://www.r-type.org/pdfs/6d4.pdf Tubes also include a 12AT7 buffer and filter amplifier, 6V6 output to 500 ohms, no transformer, and a 5Y3 rectifier in a 3.5" rack mount package. Selectable 20 or 200 KHz low cutoff for audio work. Doesn't seem to have a USB connector, but there's no moving parts. Wish I could say I'd spent hours listening to it's perfect sound stage (noise is indistinguishable from today's music) but I've never turned it on. Holiday cheers, Bill Hawkins -----Original Message----- From: Scott Burris Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 10:07 AM I saw this USB connected hourglass for producing random numbers: http://home.comcast.net/%7Ehourglass/ Anyone pursuing perfect randomness in the same way this group pursues time and frequency? Maybe cryptologists. I'm tempted to build an ethernet connected variant of this. Then of course we need a distribution mechanism. How about RNDP, the Random Number Distribution Protocol? A la NTP, clients could select for the server with the most randomness :-) Scott _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
